On Feb 8, 2007, at 8:03 PM, Joe Andrieu wrote:
Why not just have a "via" point to "source" hCards and any hCard that is
self-referential is  "authoritative"?  That seems both easy for
publishers and relatively straightforward for parsers.  Keep
dereferencing @rel="via" attributes until you find one that dereferences
to itself with @rel="via self".  Once you get to one that says "I'm my
own source," you've got a reasonable assertion of authority.

Ryan Cannon suggested this previously [2], but it seemed to get lost in
"uid url" conversations.

[2] http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007- January/008443.html

Thanks--it didn't get much traction earlier, and I have yet to see a proposal
that makes more sense based on the terms as they are currently defined.

Here's the formal def for @rel="self"
3. The value "self" signifies that the IRI in the value of the href
       attribute identifies a resource equivalent to the containing
       element.

So, refering hCards use @rel="via" and the authoritative hCard uses
@rel="via self".  And if you don't want to use an <a> link that is
self-referential use a span with class="via self url".

And if the url in the rel is also the aid, the @rel="via uid" and
@rel="via self uid" should work fine.

One catch: if the value in the URI with @rel=self has to be equivalent,
then wouldn't the data embedded in the two hCards have to be exactly the
same?

Also, how would @rel="uid" be defined as an HTML linktype, in a manner
different than the ATOM definition for @rel="via" (see my previous post)

I suggest that to determine a uid field and authority, hCard parsers
look for @class="uid" (parsed as a string, per the current spec not
as a URL), that failing, the parsers may optionally follow any links
with @rel="via" and attempt to extract a uid from the referenced hCard.

Benefits:

  * @rel="via" links can form a chain of authority.
  * @rel="via" links  do not require the author of the linked hCard to
    maintain them.
  * @rel="via" links need not be included in the actual hCard if the
    author does not want them to be.
  * All class names and link types maintain their current
    definitions, which has the least chance of breaking current
    implementations (as opposed to <a href="url uid">, which requires
    parsing rule changes and @rel="self" or @rel="me", which have
    different semantics.

Are there problems with this suggestion that I'm not seeing?

--
Ryan Cannon

Interactive Developer
MSI Student, School of Information
University of Michigan
http://RyanCannon.com

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