representative-hcard
representative hCard
This page is for keeping track of the representative hCard effort, which is part of hcard-brainstorming, specifically to figure out how to both explicitly specify and discover the representative hCard for a page.
problem statement
Short version: Given a URL, how do you determine which hCard is the representative hCard for that page?
Longer: Given a URL to a page that represents a person, how do you determine which hCard on that page is the hCard for that person? Variants:
- Given a URL to a person's hCard supporting user profile, how do you determine which hCard on the profile page represents that person?
use cases
Applications for auto-discovery of the representative hCard for the page
- representative vCard auto extraction from the page
- profile icon discovery (e.g. what people use gravatar for and have proposed pavatar for).
- social-network-portability
goals
- should leverage current hCard information publishing patterns
- should not require any additional user interface elements (i.e. links) on any hCard supporting user profiles.
methodology
Methodology for a solution: The preferred option is to use only visible semantic HTML (POSH).
effort
- representative-hcard-examples - analysis of examples of hCards in the wild on pages representing individual people
- representative-hcard-formats - previous attempts at providing representative hCard or "person info" in general for a page that represents a person.
- representative-hcard-brainstorming - proposals for solving the problem
The representative hCard is merely the hCard that provides information about the person that the page represents.
It is NOT:
- contact for the page. similarly, the person a page represents is usually the person to contact for/about the page. as documented in the hCard FAQ, the contact for a page SHOULD be marked up with an
<address>hCard. - author hCard. typically the person that a page represents is also the author of the page. possible (theoretical until someone finds/cites real world) examples: biographies, e.g. a page that represents person A is authored by person B.
- common misconception: "using <address> works when the person is the principal author of the page". This is misleading at best. It may "work", but
<address>means contact for the page (as documented above), not necessarily the author. The two might coincidentally (even typically) be the same, but are not semantically equivalent.
- common misconception: "using <address> works when the person is the principal author of the page". This is misleading at best. It may "work", but
- owner hCard. more often than not, the person that a page represents is also the person that owns (meaning has primary control over, in the property sense) the page.
"representative hCard", "contact hCard", "author hCard", and "owner hCard" are all different semantics and can be different people for any given page, even if for many pages some or all of them might be the same person.