Microid mailing list

["Mrinal Kant" <mrinal.kant AT gmail.com>]

Hi everybody,

I got introduced to microid format only recently. And it is brilliant in its simplicity and ability to do what it claims to do.

However, as I went through the specs, I felt that it would be a little cumbersome for a user to add all those meta tags if the user maintains a large number of pages, blogs, websites, etc. Especially, if the user intends to change his/her email id, it would require editing all those pages again.

I suggest that in future version of this specs, we could have something like the following: This line would tell the consumer to go look at the page mentioned in the href attribute.
<meta name='microid' href="'

http://someSite.thatBelongsToMe.com/somePageForMicroID.html'/>

This line would tell the consumer to go look at the page mentioned in the href attribute.
Similarly, to mark some limited content within a page, one could have
<div class='microid.href:http://someSite.thatBelongsToMe.com/somePageForMicroID.html'/

>
Now, we could have entries in somePageForMicroID.html
 which could contain the hash values for various sites in whatever way. Any change would require updating only this file. Even the microid version could be stated in this file thus not requiring any changes to be made in all the claimed pages/blogs/sites/etc. This would help maintain backward compatibility while allowing to add the hash as per the latest version without making any changes in the claimed resources.  Thus, the user could keep adding hashes based on various algos and email,etc. without going through the trouble of editing a variety of pages and templates. It would be easier to play around with one simple page rather than to meddle with the multiple and complex templates on blogs, etc.

Of course, one could have a utility to generate such a page from user inputs to make it more user-friendly.

The file 

somePageForMicroID.html mentioned in the href attribute could be an xml for easy extensibility instead of html. This page could keep hashes for various versions, algos, and identities (emails, etc.) simultaneously making it easier to upgrade the specs when needed.

Regards,
Mrinal