xfolk-brainstorming

xFolk Brainstorming

xFolk is a bare bones microformat for describing and tagging things represented by a URL. This definition, although simple, is pretty broad. xFolk brainstorming is a set of fairly free-flowing ideas about the future directions of xFolk. Are there functional issues you feel xFolk should address? Other issues or ideas? Do you have implementation ideas you would like to discuss? Put them here.

Authors

Bud Gibson

Add your name to the end of the list if you contribute an idea.

Functional Extensions

• We will be adding the ability to tag any visible element that has an href attribute. This includes <img> and <object> elements. It is likely that there will be more specialized, domain-specific microformats for some of these items in the future.

Attribute Value Naming

• Should we change the name of taggedlink, used to represent the item to be tagged to a more neutral name such as tagged or taggedresource?

The editor's current thinking is that taggedlink represents well the fact that people are identifying things represented by a URL. However, as some discussants have pointed out, the name may be too narrow. The editor is waiting to collect further data and use cases.

Here is one use case recently presented by Eran on the discussion list:

For simplicity let's assume I'm using xFolk for my photo tagging service. Following the microformat philosophy, I would like to present the information in a way that's meaningful both to people and machines. For a machine, a URL is enough to identify a a resource so something like the following is enough:

<span class="xfolkentry">
<a class="taggedlink" href="http://example.com/image.png">my image</a>
<a rel="tag" href="http://example.com/tag/foo">foo</a>
</span>

But to a human browing this page this makes little sense. The following alternative representation might work better:

<span class="xfolkentry">
<img class="taggedresource" src="http://example.com/image.png" alt="my
image">
<a rel="tag" href="http://example.com/tag/foo">foo</a>
</span>

Using class="taggedlink" on an IMG element doesn't seem right. Of course, we can combine the two:

<span class="xfolkentry">
<a class="taggedlink" href="http://example.com/image.png">
	<img src="http://example.com/image.png" alt="my image">
</a>
<a rel="tag" href="http://example.com/tag/foo">foo</a>
</span>

Which works very well for images but might not work so well for other media types (video, text snippets, etc.)

Eran