[uf-discuss] LinkedIn and Microformats

[Scott Reynen]

On Jun 13, 2006, at 4:18 PM, David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:

> I was going to report the happy news that LinkedIn [1] is using  
> hCards, as my little Greasemonkey script was showing an icon on the  
> page. Alas, it's not to be -- here's what they're doing:
>
> <p
>  class="vcard"><a
>  href="/addressBookExport?exportMemberVCard=&memberID=6172221"
>  name="_exportVCard">Download vCard</a></p>
>
> D'oh -- they're using "vcard" to mark that there's, umm, a vcard at  
> the other end of the link. If anyone knows anyone at LinkedIn, you  
> may want to give them a nudge.

Ideally, they'd be using microformats, but they're not doing anything  
wrong here.  Microformats don't own class attributes, and that's a  
perfectly descriptive use of the class attribute.  I think this is a  
good reminder that those of us writing parsers shouldn't be assuming  
valid microformat data based only on class attributes.  At the very  
least, the above hcard doesn't have any N property, so parsers  
shouldn't be treating it as parse-able data.

Peace,
Scott