[microformats-discuss] Discovery of microformats

Tue Jul 12 12:53:34 PDT 2005

I for one would like to reinforce that the profile mechanism is a 
good one and should be used more often.
Let me also take this opportunity to point out that the profile 
mechanism could be improved. It requires that you use a profile 
attribute in the head element. If you are creating a web page of 
harvested microformatted content or one where microformatted content 
is inserted by something like hCard creator, you typically do not 
have access to the head element. What to do? Perhaps we need to 
consider a use of the anchor <a> or some other element, i.e.,
<a href="profile.url" rel="profile">profile for microformat z</a>
contained in the inserted text.
I'm a little concerned with relying on UA parsing as the sole 
fallback. It requires that the UA have an updated notion of what the 
microformats are. How would that happen? The profile mechanism 
seems easier.
Bud
On Jul 12, 2005, at 15:32, Ryan King wrote:
> On Jul 12, 2005, at 11:41 AM, Joshua Porter wrote:
>>>> In trying to understand why I should, as a developer, produce 
>> microformat code, I realized that I don't know how to find out 
>> which sites use microformats and which don't. (Tantek's pointer 
>> on microformats.org the other day reminded me of this)
>>>> How would I (or my browsing/aggregating software) discover that a 
>> site is using microformats?
>>>> A couple of ways:
>> 1. You could tell it that there are microformats there. :)
> 2. The UA could parse the page, looking for microformats that it 
> knows about.
> 3. Profile URL- microformats can have a profile url, which is in 
> the profile attribute of the head element.
>> spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.4
> example:http://gmpg.org/xmdp/description
>> -ryan
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> josh
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