Thanks for the clarifications, especially to Tantek and Scott. I've added a bit to the FAQ. http://microformats.org/faq
Tantek wrote: >> Who is the registrar? >Currently we have profile URLs at http://gmpg.org/ and http://w3.org/ Scott wrote: >> Alternatively, who is to say which version of hCoupon is valid? >Mark Pilgrim. Rather, Mark is working on a validator, based on the specs at microformats.org. >> Who is the registrar? >http://gmpg.org/ It appears to me that there is no registrar. Whether or not we need one is a different issue, but I'd like to be clear in my understanding. >From reading through the material, the following appear to be true: 1. There is no single place that one can go to dereference a microformat to get a profile. 2. There is no system to coordinate distributed dereferencing of microformats. 3. There are no bookkeeping entities that serve as a disambiguators of microformats. 4. There are no bookkeeping entities where one can register a microformat. These are the four functions I would associate with a registrar. I should clarify I mean an automated system. Microformats.org as a social system and human readable website certainly addresses some of these needs. Or perhaps I am misunderstanding some functions provided by http://gmpg.org/ or http://w3.org/? This links back to the microformat UID/URL issue. Does it make sense to have a requirement or recommendation to specify the profile when specifying the microformat? Part of my challenge in understanding microformats and profiles is that all the examples I came across for "vcard" simply used <div class="vcard">. It seems to me that this creates a lot of problems. Especially with new microformats. (1) Some systems may not know that "vcard" or "hCoupon" is a microformat and miss the data. How does any system know that a class is a microformat? (2) When there are a lot of potential microformats, every system has to scan every class attribute in every element against the entire dataset just to check if it is in fact a microformat. This doesn't seem to scale. (3) Page authors may not know about vcard or hCoupon but use the class anyway. This is especially likely with short descriptive names. Given this, shouldn't the DIV be something like <DIV class="microformat" microformat="hCoupon" uid="guid:1F10E476-2E87-4c7e-AF2B-10DC40065764" profile="http://www.joeandrieu.com/hCoupon";></DIV> (Unfortunately this misses the elegance of the class name being the same as the microformat name.) Or because there will no doubt be future versions of the microformat standard, we could reference the standard as well. <DIV class="microformat" ref="http://www.microformats.org/v1"; microformat="hCoupon" uid="guid:1F10E476-2E87-4c7e-AF2B-10DC40065764" profile="http://www.joeandrieu.com/hCoupon";> </DIV> or perhaps something in the <HEAD> specifying which microformats are in use. <meta name="microformat" content="profile:http://www.microformats.org/v1"/> <meta name="microformatclass" content="class=hCoupon, uid=guid:1F10E476-2E87-4c7e-AF2B-10DC40065764, profile=http://www.joeandrieu.com/hCoupon/";> Then, in the page itself you can use <DIV class="hCoupon">. I initially wrote up a number of other ways you might implement such a scheme, but I guess first I'd like to understand if this challenge is one that is either (a) irrelevant/unimportant or (b) already addressed by something in microformats I don't understand yet. This thinking is leading me to slowly approximate the DOCTYPE tag from XML, but hopefully in a way that fits within the structure/model of microformats. It just doesn't seem to me that <div class="vcard"> scales to a wide variety of microformats nor to discontinuities in the microformat specification itself (or in individual microformats for that matter). It looks like it works for well-defined, formally understood terms, but not for innovative new uses. But again, I worry I'm spinning my wheels here. Am I missing something or is disambiguation an unresolved problem? -j -- Joe Andrieu [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1 (805) 705-8651 _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
