Hello everyone, I've been following the discussions for a few days & just wanted to say hi. You guys are doing some interesting cool stuff.
I'd like to propose a simple format that I would find useful. I'm new at this, so please correct my errors! Basically, checksums (MD5 & SHA-1 hashes) are offered for software releases/files to prove they haven't been tampered with. No average people use them. I think its safe to say only technical people do, and probably not as often as they should/could. What I think a microformat could do is make it easier to automatically use them and verify files. If you aren't familiar, check out http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.1/md5sums.html and http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/using_md5sums.html . Here's a few examples of what they might look like. I'm not familiar w/ "rel" but I see you guys use it quite a bit. If it's ok to create a new element, I would say "hash" or "checksum" would be better. I believe MD5 is 32 characters and SHA-1 is 40, so you should be able to tell the difference by length. <a href="http://mirrors.isc.org/pub/openoffice/stable/2.0.1/OOo_2.0.1_LinuxInte l_install.tar.gz" rel="md5:e0d123e5f316bef78bfdf5a008837577">OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 for Linux</a> (use sha-1:xxxxxx for sha-1 etc) <a href="http://mirrors.isc.org/pub/openoffice/stable/2.0.1/OOo_2.0.1_LinuxInte l_install.tar.gz" hash="e0d123e5f316bef78bfdf5a008837577">OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 for Linux</a> <a href="http://mirrors.isc.org/pub/openoffice/stable/2.0.1/OOo_2.0.1_LinuxInte l_install.tar.gz" checksum="e0d123e5f316bef78bfdf5a008837577">OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 for Linux</a> Anyways, you get the idea. A browser/extension/plugin/download manager could easily read this, then verify if the file is good (actually, just alert them if its bad would probably be easier). Another nice thing about the checksum is that it references a specific file. Some installation files don't contain a version number in them, so they all have the same filename (iTunes 5, 6, 6.0.1, 6.0.2 wer all called iTunesSetup.exe, all versions of Skype are SkypeSetup.exe, or documents, etc) so you could reference a specific version of a file & maybe find it with a search engine that stores hashes. ant _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
