[uf-discuss] hCard email & type properties

[Scott Reynen]

On Mar 12, 2007, at 6:35 AM, Kim Franch wrote:

>> So the goal is to have the href attributes point to click- 
>> tracking  URLs,
>> but have microformat parsers read the original URLs.  Even  though  
>> this is
>> possible (as others have explained), it seems to  violate the  
>> microformat
>> principle of designing for humans first,  machines second.  In  
>> this case,
>> machines are getting more useful  links than humans.
>
> Scott, may I ask you to expound a bit more on this? I suspect my
> morning cappuccino hasn't kicked in yet, but your last sentence is
> flying over my head right now. I'm working on this module precisely
> because I want humans to be able to download/import information from
> an hCard into their address books/PIMs/PDAs etc.

If I right-click on a URL and choose "Add Link to Bookmarks" in my  
browser, I should ideally get the same link that I would get if I  
clicked on my microformat parser and imported the hCard.  It sounds  
like I'm getting a different link, that you're presenting different  
content to different user agents, which is less than ideal.

> If this info is
> included in the hCard, why would a redirect link be more useful to
> machines

hCards are intended for machines to parse.  Humans can read the  
content without hCards, but machines can't, so what humans see in  
their browser is what I mean by "human-readable content," though  
obviously humans are eventually using the hCard content as well.  In  
your example, the human-readable (browser-rendered) content is less  
useful than the machine-readable hCard.  It's a subtle difference, as  
both links should eventually end up in the same place, but we should  
avoid these differences where possible.

Peace,
Scott