hcard-supporting-user-profiles-issues

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This page is for documenting issues with hCard supporting user profiles, whether techniques, implementation challenges, or issues with specific implementations.

This is an important follow-up to hcard-advocacy, that is, once a site has been evangelized to support hCard, if it has problems, or introduces problems in an update, we should document those and follow-up to help the site fix their hCards.

Please sign and date specific issues with ~~~~ so others have an idea when the problem was found, and who to potentially check with to see if the problem still exists.

Services with hCard profiles

Issues with services with hCard user profiles. Please list each service with issues alphabetically and as a heading sans punctuation for easier/cleaner permalinking. See hcard-examples-in-wild-with-problems for how to categorize/annotate hCard problems (invalid, subpotimal, hidden, requires javascript, requires XHR(XML-HTTP-Request)).

Magnolia

• suboptimal - adr has no child properties, e.g.: http://gnolia.com/people/lhalff. Tantek 07:30, 8 July 2010 (UTC) (originally reported by Andy Mabbett on 01:18, 26 Sep 2007 (PDT) - problem with http://ma.gnolia.com/people/geraldkitty)

Twitter

Issues / problems:

• hCards for groups are marked up with "fn" not "fn org". See, for example, microformats on Twitter
  • There is no way for Twitter to tell if an account is for a person or for an organization. Perhaps Twitter could implement a user preference checkbox like "[x] This account is for a company or organization", and then use that as a switch to use the "fn org" class names.
• Improper address mark-up (no child properties; though this may be all that can be achieved, if the user enters a value like "Birmingham, England")
  • Perhaps Twitter could attempt to parse the location setting on the server, and if it find some common patterns, e.g.:
    • latitude, longitude --> use geo markup with latitude and longitude subproperties
    • city, state --> use adr markup with locality and region subproperties
• Uses class="label" for non-hCard purposes, inside the hCard.
  • Ideally Twitter would choose to use another class name here other than "label". However, this may be worth raising as an hCard issue and then if we find more than one microformat that sites have this problem with, raising it to microformats issues. Note the related FAQ: How does the use of class values for semantics interact with the use of class values for attaching CSS styles.
• The rel attribute on the hCard's URL hyperlink incorrectly has "nofollow". wrong: rel="me nofollow", right: rel="me". rel-nofollow is only for 3rd party content. A user profile is second party content, and therefore is supposed to be trusted (otherwise, if the user is violating the TOS, simply remove/ban the account), and therefore there must not be any rel-nofollow on links from the user themselves.

Suggested improvements (not bugs)

• The bio field should be marked up with the property note, i.e. class="bio" should be class="bio note"

Used to have hCard profiles

The following services used to have hCard user profiles but somehow got lost/ regressed in an upgrade or something.

Zooomr

• Zooomr - hCard support appears to have been lost in their Zooomr Mark III release in 2007 June. Was: login, click on the "Your Profile" link, and copy the URL which should start with http://zooomr.com/people/.

Services that import hCard profiles

Satisfaction

• requires javascript, requires XHR: on their sign in and registration page, which allows you to choose the service of your existing hCard profile or "Other..." and enter your profile URL (which you can retrieve as described above).

See Also

• hCard (examples in the wild (with problems), issues)
• hCard supporting user profiles
• social-network-portability
• hcard-advocacy