Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Playpen #4 - Microformats/Too Many Tails?

Enthused by the WSG meeting on Microformats last Thursday, I thought I would update my website to include some hCard information, so put together an About Me section.

I thought I would include links to "me" elsewhere on the web, too - such as Flickr and Upcoming. The hCard spec allows for these sort of additional URLs, as long as you mark them up with class="url", which I duely did.

However, when the Tails extension for Firefox scrapes the page for Microformat info, if you have marked up multiple links with class="url" - it just takes the last one in the vCard element as the one which is displayed in the popup. I removed the class from the last link in the list, and Tails took the next one up. So, it seems Tails doesn't parse mutlitple URLs and list them too, it just uses "last man wins" as the URL to display - a shame :-( It would be nice if it took the one associated with the name or organisation element as primary. Perhaps there is a way to say which one is primary, and I'm missing the point?

In order that I don't mess up my about me page, I've taken these extra classes off it, but in order to show you what I mean, I've replicated the problem in the playpen4 page.

If anyone has any thoughts or comments, I'd be interested to hear them.

31st October - add:

Further to Trovster's comments, here are two screenshots for my version of Tails (0.3.4):

[click for a bigger version] - Tails displays my Contact details with just one URL: the link surrounding "Freelance Web Design & Photography" is the only anchor marked up with class="url" on this page.

However, the playpen4 page looks like this with Tails:

[click for a bigger version] Tails still displays just one URL, but this time it's the last one in the hCard list marked up with class="url", this time the link for my dConstruct Backnetwork profile.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

http://www.carolinemockett.com/
http://cazmockett.blogspot.com/
http://www.technorati.com/profile/cazmockett
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rugbymadgirl/
http://upcoming.org/user/81645/
http://rugbymadgirl.blogspot.com/
http://www.last.fm/user/cazmockett/
http://dconstruct06.madgex.com/people/person.aspx?person=carolinemockett

Is what I get when I view the about page in tails... which seems correct. Drew's hCard seems to give the correct values too.

Caz Mockett said...

Trovster, that's very odd.

What version of Tails are you using?

I'm on 0.3.4 and I checked again, it only ever displays the last URL in the list (when they are all marked up with class="url").

I'll update the post with some screenshots to show you what I mean.

Caz Mockett said...

The mystery is solved... I've updated my version of Tails to 0.3.6 and it's coming up with the same stuff as Trovster now.

So, beware if you don't keep your add-ons up to date! :-(