[uf-discuss] XFN and hCards

[Ryan King]

On Dec 22, 2005, at 1:58 PM, David Osolkowski wrote:

> In XFN Delusions of Grandeur[1], Jennifer Golbeck argues that XFN  
> isn't very useful because it annotates links between web pages, not  
> people.  Ok, so how do we make XFN link people?

First of all, see the discussion here: http://www.microformats.org/ 
blog/2005/11/02/xfn-grandeur/

> There are two people involved, a source and a target.  To identify  
> the source, a page with XFN links should include an <address>  
> element, which identifies the author of the page.  The <address>  
> element should contain an hCard, which--to my knowledge--is the  
> best method we have for representing a person in (X)HTML.

I think you'll find a lot of agreement on that around here.

> Identifying the target is a little more complicated.  Generally, we  
> should check the linked page for an <address> element, and assume  
> that linking to a page means relating to the author of that page.

I'm not sure what you mean by the last part above.

> If that assumption is incorrect, the source could link directly to  
> an hCard ( i.e. http://www.example.com/page.html#hCard).  This  
> requires the hCard to have an id, which makes things a bit  
> trickier; what should the source do if the hCard does not have an  
> id?  When publishing hCards, how do you know whether they'll need  
> ids?  Is this situation within the 80%?

You can certainly use XFN links to link directly to people's hCards.

But, honestly, I think the two concerns: 1) annotating social  
connections and 2) identifying people are separate concerns in terms  
of formats/technology.

XFN and hCard do different things. Together they can be very useful,  
but "identifying authors of pages" is a concern that stands on its  
own, apart from XFN.

> Basically, I'm proposing some best practices for using XFN with  
> hCards that seem to improve the semantics, without needing to  
> invent anything new.  If we agree on these practices, they should  
> be explained on the XFN website.

I don't know if it needs to be explained on gmpg.org. Perhaps someone  
could start a wikipage to document these best practices?

Just remember that just because two technologies get lumped together  
in an application doesn't mean they should be conflated in their  
specifications.

-rk
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com