First of all, see the discussion here: http://www.microformats.org/
blog/2005/11/02/xfn-grandeur/
Apologies, I hadn't seen that; it looks like I'm a little late on this topic, so if I'm not contributing anything new feel free to shut me up.
> Identifying the target is a little more complicated. Generally, we
> should check the linked page for an <address> element, and assume
> that linking to a page means relating to the author of that page.
I'm not sure what you mean by the last part above.
Well, the microformats blog post talks about using URLs as a proxy for people. If a page at a URL includes an <address> element, it seems safe to assume that the content of that <address> element would be a representation of the person that the URL is a proxy for.
Suppose http://source.website/blogroll.html includes an XFN link to http://target.website/. If http://source.website/blogroll.html contains an <address> element, the content of that element would be the obvious representation of the person on the source side of the XFN relationship. If http://target.website/ contains an <address> element, the content of that element would be the obvious representation of the person on the target side of the XFN relationship. But... (see below)
> If that assumption is incorrect, the source could link directly to
> an hCard ( i.e. http://www.example.com/page.html#hCard ). This
> requires the hCard to have an id, which makes things a bit
> trickier; what should the source do if the hCard does not have an
> id? When publishing hCards, how do you know whether they'll need
> ids? Is this situation within the 80%?
You can certainly use XFN links to link directly to people's hCards.
Well, the tricky situation I was trying to describe is, what if the target is an hCard on a page not authored by the person in the hCard? Suppose http://target.website/ is authored by Joe Schmoe, but http://target.website/#wife is Jane Schmoe's hCard. If someone links to http://target.website/#wife with an XFN relationship, the general case says it's a link to Joe, even though the intention may be to link to Jane. I don't know if this is a common practice, or a theoretical edge case, or something that is currently rare but could become common practice as hCard/XFN are more widely deployed (need to find the cowpaths). This may be more of an issue for tools than for people authoring websites. I don't consider myself experienced enough to make these decisions.
But, honestly, I think the two concerns: 1) annotating social
connections and 2) identifying people are separate concerns in terms
of formats/technology.
XFN and hCard do different things. Together they can be very useful,
but "identifying authors of pages" is a concern that stands on its
own, apart from XFN.
Indeed, that's why I intended to present this as "best practices when using the formats," as opposed to "changes to the formats." It's a combination of XFN, hCard, and identifying the person that a URL represents. XFN links the URLs, hCards represent the people, I'm just trying to fill in the (perceived?) gap between the URLs and the hCards.
I don't know if it needs to be explained on gmpg.org . Perhaps someone
could start a wikipage to document these best practices?
Well, at the least gmpg.org should probably link to the wiki page. "XFN works best when used as explained on [this wiki page]." How about the name "social-networking-practices" for the wiki page? I can try to draft something up during the weekend.
Just remember that just because two technologies get lumped together
in an application doesn't mean they should be conflated in their
specifications.
Agreed. I do not wish to change XFN or hCard.
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