hCard implementation

The address is imlemented using the html address element as container, which is exactly for what this element was designed for. A shortened example then might look like:

address class="vcard" span class="fn"Siegfried Gipp/span span class="street-address"Grundstr. 66/span span span class="postal-code"64385/span span class="locality"Reichelsheim/span /span /address

To visually format that example to look like you expect an address to look like, and as it looks like in my about me page, you need a simple small piece of css:

address span, address a.email, address a.url { display: list-item; list-style-type: none; } address span.postal-code, address span.locality { display: inline; }

Better would be this style:

address > span { display: list-item; list-style-type: none; }

Unfortunately, at least as far as i know, the Internet Explorer does not know tho handle this. The advantage of this would be, that only direct child elements of address are formatted as list-item. Elements further down in hierarchy would be formatted as normal, as inline. This may come in handy if you for example do not have the full name (fn), but instead have a separate given name and family name:

address class="vcard" span class="fn" span class="given-name"Siegfried/span span class="family-name"Gipp/span /span span class="street-address"Grundstr. 66/span span span class="postal-code"64385/span span class="locality"Reichelsheim/span /span /address

If this should look good for IE too, then you would have to add something to the above style:

address span, address a.email, address a.url { display: list-item; list-style-type: none; } address span.postal-code, address span.locality, address span.given-name, address span.family-name { display: inline; }

The advantage of this markup is, that it is not only human readable, but also machine readable. Combined with the autodiscovery technics it would be possible to automatically get the address data of a person just by knowing the homepage url.

It should be notet that this address recovery would be possible for address harvesters, too, and so could be misused for spamming easily. But since the publication of these addresses is necessary (in some countries enforced by law), you already need to find other protection against spam.

With a Firefox extension it is possible to export these hCard address data to a VCard file.