"uid" microformats? (was Re: [uf-discuss] ISBN mark-up)
scott at randomchaos.com
Tue Apr 25 08:45:44 PDT 2006
On Apr 25, 2006, at 9:21 AM, Tantek Çelik wrote:
> The closest thing to UIDs that current publishers of hCards are
> are their unique URLs within their sites (e.g. Upcoming and
> Eventful venues
> and events).
I have a concern that using URLs as UIDs will prevent them from being
globally identifiable, where using otherwise meaningless UIDs would
not. When Eventful is adding an event already found on Upcoming, I
would expect Eventful to be more likely to assign a UID of
123872138623 than http://upcoming.org/event/123872138623/
Both Upcoming and Eventful have event IDs that are part of event
URLs, but don't associate the events with a particular domain. The
domain association ensures the IDs are unique, but it seems to do so
at the expense of identifying multiple copies of the same event,
which I thought was the primary purpose of the UID. I expect URLs as
UIDs would allow us to identify the same event from the same site,
but not across multiple sites because each site will use its own URL
as the UID.
And in the case of book citations, aren't ISBNs the closest thing to
UIDs currently published?
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