[microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with XHTML

Thu Oct 6 08:23:53 PDT 2005

This is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for the last two 
months, so I'm just throwing it out there for discussion.

Would it be a good [bad/indifferent] idea to require declaration in the 
XHTML header that certain microformats are in use? The positive points I 
see from this are:

- scripts, such as Greasemonkey ones, won't unnecessarily scan through 
XHTML documents looking for information that is not there; after all, 
it's reasonable to expect that if this all works out, there could be 
hundreds of possible microformats, many developed in a decentralized 
manner or perhaps even one off (like within a corporate environment)
- reducing the possibility of 'accidental' recognition of microformats 
that really aren't (for example, a listing of someone's Holiday CARDs).

This could be done with a header link [1] to the XMDP profile, for example.

<html>
<head>
<link
  rel="microformat"
  title="hcard"
  href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-profile.xmdp" />
...

There may also be need a profile [2] added to the <head> to make this 
happen.

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.3
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links