On Apr 29, 2006, at 5:32 PM, Benjamin Carlyle wrote:
It is not clear to me at this time that microformats need profiles.
hcard seems to have several profiles:
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-profile
http://www.w3.org/2006/03/hcard
hcalendar seems to have none. Has this harmed adoption or made tooling
more difficult? I don't think so, at least not so far.
I think the likelihood of someone using a class name like "hcalendar"
to mean anything other than the microformat is incredibly small.
However, I have run into many people for whom such a formal
indication is a prerequisite for using a markup format, so in my
experience, the lack of profiles is harming adoption.
Microformat terms act like profiles in identifying how to process the
content, so what else would using a profile add:
1) The ability to skip parsing of a html document (or parts thereof)
becase we don't see the profile elements we recognise.
2) To provide additional disambiguation: To tell a parser which vcard
specification or version to use.
3) To identify the fact that some microformats are in use, ie use
"http://microformats.org/"; instead of a profile for a specific
microformat.
I think that (1) is based on a false premise. You have to at least
start
parsing the html document in order to know which profiles are used.
Chances are that profiles will be frequently missing or incorrect
given
the current tooling situation. I think parsers will look for
microformats they know about no matter what the profiles attribute
says.
Agreed.
(2) and (3) also seem like a bad ideas. They would be technical
measures
to allow the established microformat community base to splinter. While
we all live within one namespace we are force to interact with each
other to resolve conflict. Outside of that space confrontation is
avoided and we end up with "mymicroformats:vcard" and
"yourmicroformats:vcard" class names. Publishers would be forced to
choose between the two.
I don't really understand 3. I don't think 2 is a bad idea; I just
don't think it's necessary. It's not really "mymicroformats:vcard"
and "yourmicroformats:vcard" we might see on the web. It's "gmpg.org/
vcard" (or even "w3.org/vcard") and "mydomain.com/vcard". One is
clearly more authoritative than the other (which is so far entirely
hypothetical), so I don't think this is a worthwhile concern. I
don't think ambiguity is a worthwhile concern either, but I do think
it will be less trouble to create profiles to satisfy those who have
this concern than to convince them that it's not worth worrying about.
Peace,
Scott
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