[uf-discuss] LinkedIn and Microformats

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 6/13/06 2:56 PM, "Scott Reynen" <scott at randomchaos.com> wrote:

> 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.

Actually, I see less harm in treating Linkedin's use of class="vcard" as an
error and ignoring it than making a lot of extra work for every implementer
for one degenerate case.

Tantek