hcard-parsing

hCard parsing

by Tantek Çelik

introduction

When I first conceived of hCard, it was clear to me how to unambiguously parse both for the existence of hCards in arbitrary (X)HTML (and anywhere that arbitrary (X)HTML can be embedded, e.g. RSS, Atom, "generic XML"), and their properties and values.

I worked directly with Brian Suda to capture these thoughts in an implementation, and Brian wrote X2V, an XSLT script that converts hCards to vCards, thus simultaneously demonstrating the parsability of hCards, and the immediate utility hCard content interoperating with widespread existing vCard applications.

I am now documenting those thoughts directly here so that additional implementations, rather than having to reverse engineer X2V, can be built directly from these elementary concepts.

scope

Although this page is written specifically to explain how to parse hCard, the concepts and algorithms contained therein, serve as an example for how other compound microformats are to be parsed.