On 4 Jan 2008, at 18:29, Andy Mabbett wrote:
On the names thing, I suppose I could be tagging something with
the name
"John Smith", in which case I'd use rel-tag, or making "John Smith"
available to be downloaded as a vcard, in which case I'd use
hcard. The
semantics of "John Smith" haven't changed between those two
examples. What
I want to do with the phrase "John Smith" has, so the exact
microformat I'd
use depends on what I want to do with the names in the end, more
than their
semantics.
But that's dependent on what *you"* want to do. If you use more
consistent mark-up, then your users, and parsers, can deal with
them as they see fit.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I want to do, in terms of
marking up content, is determined by how people are going to use the
web site. If people want more intelligent searches - 'show me
manuscripts written by Captain Cook' - then rel-tag seems like the
natural tool for marking up names. On the other hand, if people want
more intelligent social networking - 'take me to Andy Mabbett's blog'
- then marking up names wth hCard seems like the way forward. I don't
see a use case for getting the contact details of Captain Cook.
hCard does a specific job very, very well - it enhances social
networking. I'm struggling to see, though, how it generalises to
marking up the names of all people, living and dead.
For instance, adding a tag doesn't tell a future search engine that
your text is about a person.
I think the answer to this is the rel-tag microformat coupled with
sensible URLs to give much more intelligent tags. Imagine if the
Maritime Museum archives used tags like:
<a rel="tag" href="/search/person/Emma_Hamilton">William Hamilton's
wife</a>
<a rel="tag" href="/search/vessel/HMS_Victory">the Victory</a>
<a rel="tag" href="/search/person/Captain_James_Cook">Captain Cook</a>
There's enough info in the HTML there to allow for some quite
intelligent searching. Classes distinguishing between the different
types of tag could be added to the links too.
Jim
Jim O'Donnell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://eatyourgreens.org.uk
http://flickr.com/photos/eatyourgreens
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