Hello. I'm new to microformats and a bit confused on how one disambiguates microformat names. It seems to be somewhat related to the UID/URI issue.
I'm not sure I understand all of the subtleties between the spec and proposals around these concepts, so I may misuse some of these terms. I'll use UID to mean a unique name, independent of how it my be located. It appears to me that UID/URIs/URNs have the potential to appear in at least four ways in relation to a microformat and I'm unclear about how the four work in current plans. 1. UID/URI that identifies the microformat (class), e.g. vCard, vCoupon 2. UID/URI that identifies the content which /is/ embedded in this particular microformat (instance) 3. UID/URI that identifies the singular thing which this microformat is about (primary reference) 4. UID/URI that identifies some feature or element of this microformat (aditional references) As an example, here is an mythical hCoupon that uses ISBN as #3, its own UID "vCoupon" as #1, a UID for this particular coupon as #2 (a GUID), and URLs to vendors as examples of #4. In theory, such a coupon could be cut & paste at one of the vendors, ala LiveClipboard. (Alternatively, the URL to the vendor of course could embed the UID of the coupon, but that is not shown in this example. And in particular requires a stable destination URL on the vendors' side.) I also took my own suggestion at the end of this email and used it as the outmost DIV. <div class="microformat" uid="hCoupon" href="http://www.joeandrieu.com/hCoupon"> <div class="hCoupon" uid="{D5BCEF02-0968-4295-A200-3C4563237DA3}" href="http://www.joeandrieu.com/MemorialDayCoupon"> <div class="advertisement"> <h1>Celebrate Memorial Day and Buy This Book!</h1> <h2 class="title">Heller is Brilliant!</h2> One of the defining anti-war books of the 20th Century. Buy it now as part of the Memorial Day Weekend rememberance special!<p> </div> <div class="msrp" currency="USD" amount="16">Retail price: $16.00</div> <div class="price" currency="USD" amount="10">Buy with this coupon only $10.00!</div> Valid from <span class="startdate" abbr="2006:04:20">April 20, 2006</span> to <span class="expirydate" abbr="2006:04:20">May 29, 2006</span>. <div class="product" type="book" uuid:ISBN="0684833395"> <h3 class="title" >Catch-22</h3> by <span class="author">Joseph Heller</span>.<p> </div> Buy today at <a class="vendor" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684833395">Amazon</a> or <a class="vendor" href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0684833395">Barnes and Noble</a> <div class="promoter"> This coupon provided by <div class="vcard"> <a class="url fn" href="http://www.joeandrieu.com">Joe Andrieu</a> <div class="org">Bob's Promotions Co</div> </div> <h1>This coupon an example only. Not valid for purchase.</h1> </div> </div> The UID of the coupon itself would/could be produced in real-time, referencing a unique offer. One could also have provided a UID or base URL for the vendors instead of or perhaps in addition to the deep link offered here. That would allow automation to perhaps engage with those vendors in a more appropriate way (they don't really need the human-readable sales page). In thinking about this example, it comes to mind that relying on a simple text name like "hCoupon" as the distinguishing name of a microformat is a bit dangerous. If we are looking at the long picture, across decades and cultures, it is easy to see hCoupon being overwritten by somebody or something in a particular domain. For all we know, this could be happening right now. vCard is well entrenched, but hCoupon??? Microformats seem to be of limited use if they can only be applied to items that are based on formal standards. I know that a principle of microformats is to "reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards" but if microformats are going to take off, shouldn't there be a way to disambiguate inevitable conflicts? How do microformats scale? As microformats gain momentum, won't there be competing microformats? How does one say "I mean /that/ version of hCoupon"? Alternatively, who is to say which version of hCoupon is valid? Who is the registrar? The owners of microformats.org? If no registrar, then don't we need something like both a UID and a URI in the microformat? In a similar pattern, with XML, you always state the DOCTYPE as the first line of the document. <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> By my interpretation that has both a format UID and a locator URI for that format. Shouldn't there be a similar disambiguation for the microformat class one is using? This seems related to namespaces and I know only that they caused some challenges with RDF... Does it make sense for a microformat to actually label itself as such, including a UID and a URI? <div class="microformat" uid="hCoupon" href="http://www.joeandrieu.com/hCoupon"> or is the critical value of microformats linked to the implied simplicity of reducing that entire line to <div class="hCoupon">? I certainly wouldn't want to label every element of a microformat with the UID and URI, but couldn't composite microformats do it once and have the URI refer to a DTD-equivalent that specifies the UID and URL for any embedded microformats in the composite? I'm not sure if I am misunderstanding the current plans for microformats or if this is still an open issue. I'd appreciate any feedback or clarification. -j -- Joe Andrieu [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1(805)705-8651 _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss