[uf-discuss] permalinks for microformat chunks of pages: use the 'id' attribute on root microformat elements

Thu Jun 22 17:44:18 PDT 2006

On Jun 22, 2006, at 1:54 PM, Tantek Çelik wrote:
> The microformat chunks (e.g. hCards, hCalendar events, hReviews 
> etc.) that
> have an "id" attribute are much easier to automatically reference 
> (and thus
> link to and browser/scroll to from search results) than those without.

In the past, I've added ID attributes to pages with multiple hCards 
thinking this would be useful for taking actions on specific 
contacts, but then discovered that most tools didn't recognize 
fragment URLs. Last I checked, I believe X2V wasn't recognizing 
fragment URLs, so it wasn't possible to export a single vcard from a 
document containing multiple hCards. To work around this, I made a 
proxy service to strip documents down to single fragments:
http://makedatamakesense.com/fraggle/
For example, Tantek has 26 hCards on his home page, but you can pull 
out just his own by running the page through this proxy:
http://makedatamakesense.com/fraggle/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftantek.com%2F% 
23hcard
And then I went back and looked at X2V again, and now it seems to be 
recognizing fragment URLs. Technorati's vcard export still ignored 
the fragment in URLs, so I thought this might still be useful there. 
But it seems to be doing some odd conversion of URLs that makes this 
impossible. This:
http://feeds.technorati.com/contacts/http://makedatamakesense.com/ 
fraggle/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftantek.com%2F%23hcard
Becomes this:
http://feeds.technorati.com/contacts/http://tantek.com/#hcard
And it converts all 26 hCards. So it looks like I wasted a little 
time on that proxy. But if there is some service out there that 
doesn't recognize fragment URLs, and anyone wants to take advantage 
of ID attributes on microformats, you can use it.
On a side note: as I was going through the hCard examples looking for 
pages with multiple hCards to see if any of them had ID attributes 
already, I noticed a lot of pages in that list don't actually have 
hCards at all. For example, I remember Neil Dunn once had a nicely 
styled hCard on this page, but now it's gone:
http://www.ndunn.com/2005/10/7/hCard
So what's the protocol here? Should such links be removed from the 
wiki? Moved to a "formerly had hCards" section?
Peace,
Scott