blog-info-brainstorming

Blog Info Brainstorming

This page documents thoughts toward establishing a new microformat to use when discussing, linking to, referring to blogs beyond just linking to them using a person or organization's name.

Contributors

• Tantek Çelik
• Chris Messina
• Kevin Marks

Simple Schema

From the blog-info-examples and the existing blog-info-formats, it seems clear that a simple schema must have:

• name of the blog
• link to the blog
• zero or more links to feeds for the blog
  • type of that feed
• name of person associated with the blog (e.g. author / contributor)

Class Names

• root class name for an item - (hBlog? hInfo? hItem?).
• "fn" for name of blog
• simple href link to the blog
• "alternate"? typed href alternate links
• "author" for stating who is blogging that blog. hCard is quite useful / flexible.

XHTML Structure

Definition List

When used in conjunction with XOXO, this could be a very useful way of outputting lists of favorites.

<dl class="hblog">
  <dt class="fn url"><a href="[link]">[Title]</a></dt>
    <dd class="author">[author hCard]</dd>
    <dd class="description">[Description]</dd>
    <dd class="alternate url"><a href="[feedlink]" class="feed">[Title]</a></dd>
    <dd class="alternate url"><a href="[homepagelink]" class="homepage">[Title]</a></dd>
    <dd>Tags: <a href="[tagspace/tag]" rel="tag">[tag]</a>, <a href="[tagspace/tag]" rel="tag">[tag]</a></dd>
</dl>

That isn't XOXO at all. XOXO has key value pairs with visible keys in <dt> and values in <dd>. If you don't want human readable key names, don't use <dl>

Non -XOXO :

<div class="hblog">
  <a href="[link]" class="fn url">[Title]</a>
    <span class="author">[author hCard]</span>
    <span class="description">[Description]</span>
    <span class="alternate url"><a href="[feedlink]" rel="feed alternate">[Title]</a></span>
    <span class="alternate url"><a href="[homepagelink]" rel="home">[Title]</a></span>
    <span>Tags: <a href="[tagspace/tag]" rel="tag">[tag]</a>, <a href="[tagspace/tag]" rel="tag">[tag]</a></span>
</div>

XOXO:

<dl class="hblog">
  <a href="[link]" class="fn url">[Title]</a>
    <dt>Author</dt><dd class="author">[author hCard]</dd>
    <dt> Description</dt><dd class="description">[Description]</dd>
    <dt>feed</dt><dd class="alternate url"><a href="[feedlink]" rel="feed alternate">[Title]</a></dd>
    <dt>homepage</dt><dd class="alternate url"><a href="[homepagelink]" class="home alternate url">[Title]</a></dd>
    <dt>Tags</dt><dd><a href="[tagspace/tag]" rel="tag">[tag]</a>, <a href="[tagspace/tag]" rel="tag">[tag]</a></dd>
</dl>

See Also

• blog-info-examples
• blog-info-formats
• hAtom