On 4/24/06 7:42 AM, "Bruce D'Arcus" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 4/21/06, Tantek Çelik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Just as we extracted "geo" and "adr" from hCard to address the use cases >> brought up the Geo community for a simple format for locations, perhaps we >> can extract "uid" from hCard for this purpose and be done with it without >> adding any additional vocabulary. >> >> Thoughts? > > A question, really: what are the semantics of uid? It's not clear from > the hCard spec, It's quite clear. hCard normatively references vCard for semantics, which says: 3.6.7 UID Type Definition Type purpose: To specify a value that represents a globally unique identifier corresponding to the individual or resource associated with the vCard. > and poking around on uid and vCard suggests that it is > a concept that may well predate uris? > > If that's the case, I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to call it > uri, and bring that back to hCard? If you believe there are non-trivial advantages (especially to publishers), go ahead and add it in a new section on hcard-brainstorming so we can at least capture the proposal. http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-brainstorming My intuition says this is an unnecessary change. First, in general changing names of properties in microformats is a bad idea, unless you are doing so to reuse from other microformats and thus reducing the overall vocabulary (which we did in a revision of xFolk). Nothing is using "uri" currently, so this would actually be an expansion to the vocabulary. Second, changing the name of something from the standard which you are attempting to interoperate with (vCard) is also a bad idea (unnecessary namesmithing), which results in lots of subtle name changes (see XML/RDF attempts at vCard/iCalendar) which were made essentially at the whims of the authors of the specs (I have found no documented methodology for the changes). In microformats, *every* change from the name in a standard we have documented meticulously, and documented the methodology for doing so (e.g. plural vs. singular, explicit sub-property names taken from the prose descriptions in the standards, etc.) Third, I actually see disadvantages in using URIs as a basic unit rather than URLs. URLs are far more useful in that they assert you can go get this thing, it has a location, most likely on the Web. Thus as a pattern we should use URLs in microformats, not URIs. OTOH, an opaque UID which asserts nothing but "globally unique identifier" (see above) is both quite simple, and much more "backwards compatible" with use of UID in vCard/iCalendar applications today. Thanks, Tantek _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
