[uf-discuss] Re: A (big) problem with XFN: identity of source andtarget not findable

[Toby A Inkster]

Costello, Roger L. wrote:

> The purpose of a representative hCard is to identify itself as "Hey,
> look at me, I am the author of this page."

Correction: the representative hCard may not represent the author of the 
page. For example, the representative hCard on the Wikipedia entry for 
Julius Caesar would normally be an hCard for Julius Caesar. But Julius 
Caesar is not the author of the page.

The representative hCard is the contact information for the person or 
organisation that the page is supposed to, in some way "represent".

> Back to the robot ... it looks for the representative hCard and finds
> it.  It now knows half of the relationship, i.e. Alice Jones is friends
> with ??? To get the other half, the robot follows the link to Bob's
> web page, finds the representative hCard on that web page

An optimisation: Alice may already have an hCard for Bob on her page. In 
which case the robot is wasting time and bandwidth if it needs to download 
Bob's page. So if Alice's page has an hCard with a UID property set to the 
same URL as the target of the XFN link, this hCard may be used instead.

-- 
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.17.14-mm-desktop-9mdvsmp, up 2 days, 17:58.]

                              The Semantic Web
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