parsing-microformats

Parsing Microformats

Microformat parsing mechanisms that depend on documents having even minimal xml properties like well-formedness may fail when consuming non-well-formed content. Tidy or even better CyberNeko may be a useful work around. In particular X2V uses XSLT, and tidy to clean any non-well-formed input before processing it.

Parsing class values

When parsing class values care must be taken:

1. Class attributes may contain multiple class names, e.g: class="foo vcard bar"
2. Class attributes may contain class names which contain the class name used by a microformat, e.g: class="foovcardbar" class="foovcard", class="vcardbar".
3. Multiple class names are seperated by one or more whitespace charchters.
4. Class names are case sensitive.

See http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.2.

JavaScript example

The Ultimate getElementsByClassName JavaScript function may be useful. Then you can do:

var adrs = document.getElementsByClassName(document, "*", "adr");

or even:

var cities = document.getElementsByClassName(document, "*", "locality");

XSLT example

<xsl:if test="contains(
   concat (' ', normalize-space(@class),' '),
   ' vcard '
   )" > ...

xpath generator, to help you generate those long ugly xpath queries. [link broken as of 8 August 2006]

XQuery example

Also using XPath...

<div style="background-color:yellow;">
{
  for $a in doc()//div[@class='vcard']
  let $b := $a/div[@class='fn org']
  let $c := $a/div[@class='adr']
  return ($b, $c, <br />)
}
</div>

For example, this could be used against http://technorati.com/about/contact.html. See Firefox extensions for getting XQuery in Firefox.

Simple XPath expressions can also be used.

Parsing rel/rev values

Parsing rel and rev values is similar to parsing class values except for the following differences:

1. rel and rev values should be separated by one space.
2. rel and rev values are case insensitive.

See http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links.

See Also

• xmdp-brainstorming