[uf-dev] Discovery of Microformatted documents

Mon May 5 02:09:39 PDT 2008

Julian Bond wrote:
> We've been looking at ways of discovering microformatted documents. 
> The
> requirement is to be able to say something like "My Profile page is at
> this URL".

Probably something like:
	<a href="http://link.to.profile.invalid/me" type="text/html"
	rel="me meta">Link to my profile</a>
is the best way to link to a page which contains metadata about you. 
(rel=meta is formally defined in the XHTML 2 drafts, but has been 
used for years by the Dublin Core and FOAF communities to indicate a 
page which contains relevant metadata.)
> This page http://www.gmpg.org/xfn/join seems to suggest
> http://gmpg.org/xfn/11 as a relatively permanent URI to use for XFN 
> but
> it wouldn't distinguish between cases 2 and 3.
>> This page http://microformats.org/wiki/profile-uris defines some URI
> candidates as well. But I think my requirement is at a slightly higher
> level.

The term "profile" used on those pages has nothing to do with 
"personal profiles". It refers to the (rarely used) "profile" 
attribute of the <head> element which is used to link to one or more 
documents that describe the way that you're using HTML. For example:
	<head profile="http://gpmp.org/xfn/11">
may be used to indicate that when you write 'rel="contact"', you are 
using the definition of 'rel="contact"' which can be found in XFN 
1.1, and not, say, the entirely different definition of 
'rel="contact"' which the current HTML 5 drafts use.
In terms of microformats, the <head profile> attribute can be thought 
of as a place to list which microformats you use on the page, so that 
parsers can distinguish between an intentional use of hCard and a co- 
incidental use of 'class="vcard"' by someone who's never even heard 
of hCard.
-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail at tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>