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|hCard]], similar to how we have reused [[geo]] and [[adr]] from [[hcard|hCard]].

== References ==
* [[adr]]
* [[geo]]
* [[hcard|hCard]]

== See Also ==
* [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt RFC 2396] Uniform Resource Identifiers 
* [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4452.txt RFC 4452] the "info" URI scheme for information assets with identifiers in public namespaces.
* [http://ocoins.info COinS] for putting attaching openurl context objexts to a span.
* [http://unapi.info unAPI] has a technique for embedding IDs in html so that they can be retrieved from an unAPI service.
* [http://www.taguri.org/ Tag URI] an algorithm that lets people mint identifiers that no one else using the same algorithm could ever mint.

== Related Discussion ==
* [http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2006-April/003726.html UID, URL, live microformats]
* [http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2005-November/002046.html format for identifiers]