[uf-discuss] "authoritative hCards", a simpler proposl

[Mike Schinkel]

John Allsopp wrote:
> A number of somewhat overlapping suggestions seem to be
> floating around regarding this.
> 
> There is definitely a strong use case, IMO, for somehow
> indicating that some hCard over there is a more detailed
> version of this one.
> 
> For example, at the various conference sites I am
> involved wiht, we mark up all speakers using hCard. Ofen
> it's simply
> 
> <span class="vCard"><a href="http://johnfallsopp.com"
> class="url fn">John Allsopp</a>
> 
> Now, if this could point at an hCard with more
> information about the speaker so marked up, to me that
> would be potentially very useful for something like Tails
> or Operator to pull in that additional information, or
> for aggregating references to the same person and on.
> 
> As to definitiveness or authoriativeness, I think that's
> a tougher nut to crack.

Thanks for the clarification. In reading the threads I didn't get the part
about including a URL in an hCard to point to another hCard. That is
helpful. OTOH I think (as you imply) this discussion might be attempting to
use a pickaxe to resolve a problem that requires a bulldozer. Or said
another way, trying to resolve a problem whose proper solution lies in a
different domain.

I've actually recently been thinking about a related question. i.e. what is
a person's canonical URL?  Google "Roy T. Fielding", "Bill Gates", "Linus
Torvalds", or even "John Allsopp" or "Mike Schinkel" and tell me which URL
is the canonical URL?  I've been planning to blog about this for weeks.  Do
you, or anyone, have a proposed solution to this dillema?  Basically the
problem is simplified as "What URL identifies a person, and more
importantly, how does someone who doesn't know that person or can't reach
that person to ask be able to find it?"

And, being an advocate for "Well Designed URLs", I do not think the right
solution is to simply tag a random and undiscoverable and unmemorizable UID
onto the end of a URL. But I'd have to understand the problem domain and
use-cases to be better able to make an alternate proposal.

-- 
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org
http://atlanta-web.org - http://t.oolicio.us
"It never ceases to amaze how many people will proactively debate away
attempts to improve the web..."