06.06.05
Head-Spinnin’ on MicroFormats
[Update: 6/6/2005]Corrected some syntactic mistakes in the embedded microformat example. Apologies to any who got caught in the crossfire.
Okay, discussion on my most recent post about MicroFormats has left me dazed and confused. Do I need to adjust my medication? Probably. But I list below the following points of bewilderment. Somebody, please help!
- Tantek seems to be saying that this discussion is the misguided theoretical contemplation of microformat-bashing naysayers. I find this perplexing as everybody (your author humbly excluded pending the final adjustment of his meds; see above) involved in the discussion seems to be an intelligent, fairly ardent supporter of microformats trying to understand how to build systems around them today. As near as I can tell, we’re all in this dicussion to see how to clear the path for more rapid adoption of microformats. Part of that involves looking at areas where there might be stumbling blocks, not to highlight them as reasons not to proceed but to understand them as areas that require caution, and perhaps invent solutions. None of this strikes me as antithetical to progress, but perhaps I’m missing something (is it 1 red pill and 2 blue ones, or 2 red ones and 1 blue one? Aaargh.).
- Brian further explicates some of the issues regarding “url” appearing as a property in both hCalendar and hCard. But I am again confused when he writes “I agree that the URL in vCard IS the same URL in iCal.” I just realized that part of my problem is that I’m not sure I understand the theoretical example we’ve been discussing, where an hCard is embedded inside an hCalendar instance. Are we assuming that the hCard encapsulates information about the location of the event (the famous Argent Hotel in San Francisco in the canonical example)? Or is it subject of the event (the Web 2.0 Conference)? I’ve been assuming that it’s the former, but I suppose it could be either. At any rate, there are (at least) two potential url’s (one for the hotel and one for the conference), so it’s not clear to me what Brian means when he says they’re the same. I’m biting the bullet and writing an example to illustrate.
Web 2.0 Conference: October 5;- 7, at the Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA (info & reservations)I have a sneaking suspicion that the example above is not structured the way that others have been thinking about it. In constructing it, I started to feel that I was on shaky ground in using an hCard to represent the hotel. Is that inappropriate? The Technorati Wiki refers to hCard as a representation for people and companies; the vcard spec says it’s for representing a “white-pages person object.” I’m assuming that, despite the apparent vcard limitation of scope, that people will/do use vcard’s for contact information for companies in addition to people.
Anyway, I’m hoping that in light of the example above, Brian will help me to understand what he means when he says that url in hCalendar and url in hCard are the same.
Finally, I wanted to thank Ryan for pointing me to Douglas Clifton’s DRX. Although I haven’t been able to see it yet (site appears to be down), it’s always helpful to see how others are using/intepreting these ideas. And props to Brian for pointing me at the various brainstorming pages — somehow I had missed those.
Tags: microformats
Todd said,
June 7, 2005 at 2:19 pm
Discussion on this topic continued here.
Douglas Clifton said,
June 8, 2005 at 7:37 pm
Todd,
I’m sorry you were unable to visit drx, and am puzzled that you had problems doing so. If you’d like to try again, or drop me an email with details I’d be happy to look into it.
On a side note, I see you have Danny listed in your blog roll. You might find it interesting that I’m in the process of dumping the entire drx database to him (or anyone for that matter) in RDF. This will probably be ready to go tomorrow after I finish up writing the code and testing it.
Regards,
Doug
brian said,
June 9, 2005 at 12:05 pm
I hope this will clearify the definition of SAME in my previous post. The URL in the hCard spec is the same thing as the URL in hCalendar spec. BOTH mean Universal Resource Locator, they are both a universal pointer to a resource. My counter-example was TITLE. The title property in Dublin Core means “A name given to the resource”, where as TITLE in some real estate microformat would mean “deed, property title, proof of ownership”. Dublin_core:Title and real_estate:Title are NOT semantically the same even though they are both called ‘TITLE’. With hCard:url and hCal:url both have the same name AND the same meaning. This is what an ontology provides, which is something else RDF provides and microformats don’t (yet).
Todd said,
June 10, 2005 at 3:42 pm
Doug,
It must have been a temporary ISP outage somewhere along the line. Since I originally posted, I’ve had numerous occasions to visit DRX to browse. I think it’s a great resource. Thanks!
Todd said,
June 10, 2005 at 4:14 pm
Brian,
I had to go back to the original specs for vCard and iCalendar to understand what you meant.
Basically, those specs say that the “URL” points to a resource associated with the person (vCard) or event (iCalendar). In both cases, its semantic value is pretty low, compared to, say, “DTSTART,” which has a precise meaning and plays a key role in iCalendar. In comparison, the “URL” properties just mean, “here’s a URL that points to something.” And given that low semantic ambition, I can see why you would say that they are the same.
If one were to compose an hCard inside an hCalendar (e.g., for ATTENDEE, as suggested by the hCalendar spec), you would want to be cognizant of the scope of the hCalendar:url vs. the hCard:url; while they each just point to “stuff,” they presumably point to different stuff and, in parsing, you wouldn’t want to confuse one for the other.
But I’d wager that we’re not going to see a ton of this embedding anyway — it’s too complicated to author by hand and kind of a mismatch with the current crop of content management systems.
brian said,
June 10, 2005 at 5:17 pm
With-in the iCalendar spec, there are ‘roles’ which have not yet been described in hCal. These roles allow for a pointer, i don’t think any of the examples in the spec point to a url, but it could. One thing that has NOT been kicked around, and probably won’t due to over-complexity, is to reference an entity somewhere else, in the page or another site using anchor links.
<a href=”/contact.htm#brian” class=”vcard”>link to my vcard</a>
saying that at the end of this link there will be the rest of my vcard information. That is one way to possible reference an outside microformat with worrying about any internal parsing… although you just create a new problem; should parsers travers extranal links (things could get cyclical or BIG).