representative-hcard
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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
Related but slightly different concepts:
- 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.