uid-brainstorming

UID Brainstorming

This page is for brainstorming about ideas, proposals, constraints, requirements for a UID microformat.

Authors

• Tantek Çelik
• Ed Summers

Experience

• a microformat for indicating something *is* an identifier rather than the solved problem of providing a microformat *for* identifiers (RFC 2396)

Goals Requirements

• a method of publishing an asserted globally unique identifier for a piece of content or a referenced item

Thoughts

UIDs that are URLs

It seems like in the 80% case (perhaps 99.99% case on the Web), a UID is going to be a URL, thus a common pattern will likely be things like:

<a class="url uid" href="http://example.com/contentspace/somenumber">the item</a>

UID + URL -> permalink?

Can you infer that if something is a URL and a UID that it is also a permalink? It seems so. I can't think of any semantic of "permalink" that isn't covered by the union of the semantics of URL and UID.

Proposals

Just use UID from hCard

• Tantek proposed that we see if we can reuse uid from hCard, similar to how we have reused geo and adr from hCard.

abbr pattern

Use the abbr-design-pattern to allow identifiers to be more fully described.

<abbr class="uid" title="urn:isbn:0950788120">0 9507881-2-0</abbr>

References

• adr
• geo
• hCard
• abbr-design-pattern

See Also

• RFC 2396 Uniform Resource Identifiers
• RFC 4452 the "info" URI scheme for information assets with identifiers in public namespaces.
• COinS for putting attaching openurl context objexts to a span.
• unAPI has a technique for embedding IDs in html so that they can be retrieved from an unAPI service.
• Tag URI an algorithm that lets people mint identifiers that no one else using the same algorithm could ever mint.

Related Discussion

• UID, URL, live microformats
• format for identifiers