Comments on: Implementing the hCard microformat

By: Ewen

Ewen — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:25:54 +0000

Hi Bruce, very useful article, it's great to see hCard popularity increasing, if others are looking for an easy way to generate the hCard HTML content one of my colleagues created an online 'hCard-o-matic'. It's New Zealand specific but I'm sure the output could be easily tailored for other countries.

By: Seán Sloane

Seán Sloane — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:37:54 +0000

As you can see I'm sort of new to this and the warning message from the validation page had confused me... It still does but I'm going to leave it text/html and .html...

By: Bruce

Bruce — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:29:36 +0000

I have added the content-type application/xhtml+xml to my page and changed the extension to html

I don't understand why you did that. application/xhtml+xml is paired with .xhtml, and text/html with .html; W3C advice is to go with the latter.

By: Seán Sloane

Seán Sloane — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:19:12 +0000

Bruce, thank you for your help. I read somewhere that there's an error on the validation page for XHTML. I have added the content-type application/xhtml+xml to my page and changed the extension to html and I get this warning from the xhtml validator...
" Conflict between Mime Type and Document Type

The document is being served with the text/html Mime Type which is not a registered media type for the XHTML 1.1 Document Type. The recommended media type for this document is: application/xhtml+xml

Using a wrong media type for a certain document type may confuse the validator and other user agents with respect to the nature of the document, and you may get some erroneous validation errors. How to fix this problem? One of the following techniques should help:

If you are serving a static file on a Web server, changing its extension should help. Use e.g .xhtml for XHTML or .mathml for MathML.
You may need to reconfigure your Web server. This Setting up MIME Types tutorial has instructions for Apache, Tomcat and IIS.
If the document is generated dynamically, the scripting language should allow you to set up the mime type: this article on MIME Types and Content Negotiation has examples in PHP, Perl, and ASP."

Because of this message I changed the extension to .xhtml and it passed without a message. My server is configured properly and the document is also setup properly...

By: Bruce

Bruce — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:33:59 +0000

Sean, I'm unclear what you mean by .xhtml becoming standard. XHTML is a standard, as used on this site, with a .html file extension and a content-type declaration of text/html (as recommended by the W3C). I notice your page uses no content-type which, as I understand it, should be set to application/xhtml+xml if you are using a .xhtml file extension. Using .xhtml excludes most of your potential audience from viewing your site; I guess this is why I've never come across anyone else using it.

By: Seán Sloane

Seán Sloane — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 08:27:24 +0000

Bruce, thank you for your help... there must be something wrong with my install as it worked on another friend's system as well.

To validate xhtml 1.1 strict the validator wouldn't validate without strange comments without .xhtml extension. It is becoming standard from what I saw in the w3c pages but it's Microsoft that's not standard...

By: Bruce

Bruce — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 07:11:16 +0000

Have you tried to download it on a different computer Sean? I'm running a clean install of 10.5.1; I downloaded your vCard via the JavaScript in your page fine; it imported into Address Book fine; and the contents look as they should in a text editor. Perhaps something has gone awry with your machine?

Note that I can't open your page in Windows XP/ Internet Explorer 7, because it doesn't know how to handle the non-standard .xhtml file extension you are using.

By: Seán Sloane

Seán Sloane — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:45:32 +0000

This looks like it could be a great thing if only I could get it to work... I have noticed that the vCard that is downloaded when clicking on any of the icons (your page and mine) is not correctly formatted as Apple's Address Book 4.1/Mac OS X 10.5.1 will not import it. When I open the downloaded "vCard" in a text editor it is empty.

From Technoati's pages I have tried both of theirs and only the one with the button on the hcard page actually works. The favelet link doesn't work either.

Please let me know if you can see where the problem lies...