Own your Identity had a great post today detailing a great feature on the signup form of the Get Satisfaction site.

They rely on the fact that sites like Twitter and Flickr publish an hCard microformat for all of their users publicly on their website. If you go to my twitter page and view the source, you’ll find the following code available to anyone (without authentication):

<address>
   <ul class="about vcard entry-author">
      <li><span class="label">Name</span> <span class="fn">Zach Leatherman</span></li>
      <li><span class="label">Location</span> <span class="adr">Omaha, NE USA</span></li>
      <li><span class="label">Web</span> <a href="http://www.zachleat.com/" class="url" rel="me">http://www.zachle...</a></li>
      <li id="bio"><span class="label">Bio</span> <span class="bio">UI Programmer, JavaScript Enthusiast, Soccer Hooligan</span></li>
   </ul>
</address>

The premise here is that hCard tells you how to parse this markup to get usable information. The adr CSS class tells you what my address is. The fn CSS class tells you what my name is, and so on. So, Get Satisfaction goes and spiders this page behind the scenes and autopopulates your profile with what it can find. Pretty sweet.

Now, they don’t limit you to the services they provide, which are: Flickr, Technorati, Twitter, Upcoming, and last.fm. They provide an Other category for any hCard enabled URL (your personal homepage or perhaps an hResume you have posted on the web).

Integrate with OpenID

However, why not take it to the next level? Why not integrate this microformat functionality WITH an openid login system? You’d be able to kill two birds (not a twitter joke) with one stone in some cases, since both Twitter and Technorati are also OpenID producers (re-echo: We need more consumers).

So, not only do you get the benefits of having OpenID authentication on your website, but you’d be able to prepopulate a certain amount of profile data with an hCard parser. And the best part is, if you already have a nice clean user interface set up to handle different OpenID producers, there wouldn’t be any additional clutter on the interface to get this benefit. It’d be transparent to the user when it works, and fall back to a normal empty profile form when it doesn’t.

What I’d like to see, is more sites that are OpenID producers, also serve hCard microformats as well. If we can get all the major producers on board, we’d have a nice tidy little system going.

JavaScript

Looking at the source code of the Flickr home page is actually pretty strange. For one, there is only one JavaScript source code file (other than the advertising scripts), a solution for PNG Alpha Transparency in Internet Explorer, included as an HTML Component. The source for the PNG Behavior script (credit to Erik Arvidsson) is unchanged, with the exception of the removal of some extraneous comments, but curiously enough no whitespace removed (a suggestion to save them a few bucks in bandwidth). Looking at their HTML source, they seem to emphasize whitespace and readability over bandwidth savings, which seems fine to me. At least their visitors (you and I) can more easily learn something from their code.

CSS
They’ve taken the same route as one of the tips from Jonathan Snook, and declared all styles for an element on a single line. They use your standard css to reset to a base starting point, much like YUI’s Reset CSS we’re all familiar with. One interesting declaration I noticed prominently inside of their CSS was the .Butt css class, declared on their primary Search form button. I’m curious to know the semantic meaning behind that one.

They use the tan hack as well to isolate a CSS declaration for IE browsers:

* html #featured-image cite {bottom: -1px;}

This is to workaround for an IE limitation to absolutely positioning content at the bottom of a relatively positioned div, in this case the black box containing the credits (or citation, hence the cite tag) inside of the feature image.

Another interesting CSS Hack they’ve employed involves the line-height for <a> tags containing Unicode characters to select different languages. It starts out like Dustin Diaz’s min-height hack, but throws a loop.

height: 0px !important;
height /**/:13px;

I’m not familiar with the /**/ syntax, and would really appreciate any information someone has on what platform this is targeting. A comment would be nice!

HTML

Standard here, and they have some nice meta tags for the I-phone:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=950" />

All in all, it’s short and sweet code for a home page. It’s nice to see such clean code with an eye towards standards on a commercially successful site, many props to their programmers. I’m scared to do my next in the series, because I’m 100% sure it won’t be as nice of a read as Flickr was.