Implied hCard Brainstorming

These are ideas for solutions to implied-hcards. See hcard-implied-examples for use cases.

Initial ideas

The rule could be similar to:

If a an element with class=vcard does not have any hCard class names, imply the entire content as an fn field, and attempt to apply the implied "n" optimization.

Optionally, if the root element has @href, imply a class="url".

For example:

<a class="vcard" href="http://ryancannon.com/">Ryan Cannon</a>

becomes

BEGIN:VCARD
N:Cannon;Ryan;;;
FN:Ryan Cannon
URL:http\://ryancannon.com/
END:VCARD

All this is possible because it requires an hCard without hCard markup inside.

This is fairly powerful for a few reasons:

• It does not require in-depth knowledge of hCard or vCard
• Extraordinarily simple markup
• Provides a smaller barrier-to-entry for microformats that require hCard

Additionally, the @href could map to different properties based on protocol:

• [href^='http'] would map to url
• [href^='mailto'] would map to email
• [href^='data'] would map to photo

--Ryan Cannon

See also

• Mailing list discussion: January 2008