[uf-discuss] class="url"?

[Brian Suda]

On 11/5/06, Siegfried Gipp <siegfried at rorkvell.de> wrote:
> The problem shows up, if you have a hCard or vEvent record containing more
> than one link, and only one of these links is really related to that record,
> the others are, as cou called it, random data. Well, i think, that such a
> hCard or vEvent record, from the beginning of the container marked with
> class="hcard" resp. class="vevent" up to the end of that container should
> only contain data relevant for the hCard or vEvent record, plus just filling
> material.

--- having ONLY data related to vcard and vevent is not practical, it
forces people to change the way they already publish, it does not
allow for extensiblity to embed multiple microformats inside one
another. If vevents could ONLY contain vevent information, then you
could never use a vcard for the location.

> Now what about the url in hCard? What does it contain? There are different
> possibilities of a url. One might be some http://www.bla.blub which points to
> the home page. The homepage is a valid field in VCARD.

--- not sure what you mean by "homepage is a valid field in VCARD"?
There is a URL property in vCard, but no HOMEPAGE. Also, URL does NOT
take TYPES in vCard, so you can't do URL;TYPE=WORK:example.com (this
is a feature of some address books, but it is not part of the RFC
specification)

> But what about not putting the written url onto the page? But instead writing
> the text "homepage"?
> <address class="vcard">
>     <a href="http://www.bla.blub">Homepage</a>
> </address>
> This is valid, and through using the <a> element the content of the href
> attribute is by specification a url. So adding class="url" to that link is
> simply redundant. And: This container does not contain a url, instead it
> contains the text "homepage".

It may seem redundant, but it is the only way to disambiguate random
links with links associated with the vcard/vevent

> REM.:Is there a specification in VCARD to specify which kind of url this is?

--- nope, the URL property in RFC 2426 does NOT have TYPEs. (3.6.8 URL
Type Definition)

   ;For name="URL"
   param        = ""
        ; No parameters allowed

   value        = uri

> Next: There are other types of urls. What about this:
> <address class="vcard">
>     <a class="email" href="mailto:someone at bla.blub">email</a>
> </address>
> Still legal. But still, the class="url" is not only unnecessary but not
> appropriate, since the container dies not contain an url, it contains the
> text "email".

--- You have to remember that the VCARD spec was created many many
years ago, there are TYPEs for EMAIL that pre-date URL structure and
are propretary schema. MAILTO: and SMTP have eventually won out. So
EMAIL, in hCard is a specialized type of URL.

Class="url" can be used to associate IM protocols as well:

<address class="vcard">
    <a class="url" href="jabber:someone at bla.blub">jabber account</a>
</address>


> So exploring this, class="url" would only make sense in two very different cases:
> 1. You really include a url within the container.
> 2. You define that "url" does not mean a general url, but specifically the url
> to the "homepage". This would be a matter of definition and should be
> clarified. In this case, "homepage" would be the better class name, but since
> the VCARD specification already uses url, i think it's better to stick to
> that. Although then url as defined here would have a different meaning than
> url defined at the w3c. It would be possible, but should be clarified.

--- i don't understand how you are relating URL to homepage in your
2nd point. I don't think HOMEPAGE is a better class name. In many
cases for events you want to point to the very
specific-deep-linked-page for that event and therefore it is not a
homepage, but simple a URL. I'm also not sure how the Microformat
definition of URL differs from the W3C version?

-brian

-- 
brian suda
http://suda.co.uk