[uf-discuss] hCard email & type properties

Mon Mar 12 07:24:40 PST 2007

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