[whatwg] Conformance criteria for hCard and hCalendar

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 22 May 2006, Matthew Raymond wrote:
> 
> Will there be a <resume> element for hResume[1]?
> How about a <review> element for hReview[2]?

It certainly isn't my intention to add such elements so far, as I've heard 
nobody asking for them. Do you think they would be useful? They seem a bit 
specific. HTML just represents documents (for some definition of 
"document" that includes "application", at this point), it doesn't have 
the ability natively to say "this is a letter", "this is a resume", "this 
is a review", etc. I don't think we really want to go there.


> Exactly where does this end?

Wherever we want it to end. In general we want to aim for the 80% case, I 
think. Your implied suggestion seems to be that vCard and iCalendar are 
not in the 80% case. That's certainly possible.


> 1) When using XHTML, is there any benefit the <card> and <calendar> 
> elements plus hCard and hCalendar would give over something like RDF 
> vCard[3]?

It's hard to see any benefit that using hCard and hCalendar _wouldn't_ 
give over using RDF. :-)


> 2) What standards bodies control hCard and hCalendar?

microformats.org is the closest to a standards body that currently 
controls those specs. But I assume you knew that, so I'm not sure what 
you're really asking here.


> 3) If we're going to create markup to essentially "bind" microformats, 
> why not have more general elements for this purpose rather than two 
> elements that target specific microformats?

I'm not sure what more general element you would need, given that 
microformats are doing quite fine without anything more than HTML4 
provides.

Note that <card> and <calendar> weren't originally intended to "bind" to 
microformats, but to whole-sale import the syntax of hCard and hCalendar. 
It's not clear whether we'll be able to do that, given the quality of the 
hCard and hCalendar specs right now.


> 4) It's beginning to look like microformats are just a way of getting 
> around HTML's own lack of namespace support. Are standardized 
> microformats really any better than the HTML namespaces Internet 
> Explorer introduced?

Namespaces using prefixes as in XMLNS really aren't well understood by 
authors. I'm not sure adding namespace support would be a good move.

I'm also not sure why you think microformats have anything to do with 
namespaces. You still need a central authority (or two, or three) to make 
sure that everyone speaks the same language.

-- 
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