Wed, 03 Oct 07

A microformat for my contact details (instant messaging, twitter et al)

I haven’t done any research on this so it may have already been proposed over at the microformats site.

The problem

Sometimes I want to communicate with the author of a webpage. I don’t want to have to hunt around to find contact details and I probably don’t want to fill in a form.

A proposal to fix part of the problem

If the author’s contact details were semantically marked up, either on the page I was looking at or linked to elsewhere on the web, then I could use a simple parser to extract those details and select the best communication tool to use manually.

Maybe some code can help explain what I mean.

A semantically marked up contact page.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">

<html>

  <head>
    <title>Contact Details</title>
  </head>

  <body>
    <dl class="contactDetails">
      <dt>Skype</dt>
      <dd class="skype identifier">skype-username</dd>
      <dt>MSN</dt>
      <dd class="msn identifier">msn-username</dd>
    </dl>
  </body>

</html>

A parser in ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'

class ContactParser
  def self.from_html(html)
    doc = Hpricot(html)
    new(doc)
  end
  def initialize(hpricot_doc)
    @hpricot_doc = hpricot_doc
  end
  def service_identifiers
    (@hpricot_doc/'.contactDetails .identifier').inject({}) do |hash, e|
       service = (e.classes - ['identifier']).first
       identifier = e.inner_text
       hash[service] = identifier
       hash
    end
  end
  def identifier(service)
    (@hpricot_doc/".contactDetails .#{service}.identifier").inner_text
  end
end

contact_details_file = File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/contact-details.html'
html = File.open(contact_details_file) { |f| f.read }
parser = ContactParser.from_html(html)

p parser.service_identifiers
# => {"skype"=>"skype-username", "msn"=>"msn-username"}
p parser.identifier('skype')
# => 'skype-username'
p parser.identifier('blurgh')
# => ''

Further considerations

If existing communication tools¹ were to integrate this parser then it would be easy to add a contact by giving the url of, for example, their blog.
Author’s should be able to specify the order of the tools that they wish to use for communication. We could just assume that the list of contact details is in the author’s preferred order.
This would be open to spam. Err, not too sure what to do about this.
Ultimately, I’d like to hit a ‘communicate’ button in firefox that automatically decides which communication protocols we have in common and allows me to get my message through.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Code is all over on google code.

¹ I’m thinking of multi protocol tools, like adium, in particular.