All in the <head> – Ponderings and code by Drew McLellan –

Moving hkit Forward

A few days back I took the step of setting up hkit as a project on Google Code. If you’re not familiar, hkit is a PHP5-based microformats parser designed to help find and extract common microformats form arbitrary web pages. You can play with a live demo to get the idea. Not a complete piece of solution in its own right, but a building block to enable PHP web applications to make use of microformats.

Although always open source (hkit carries an LGPL license), up until now all the development had been behind closed doors for no other reason that my having not put anything more structured in place. After receiving all sorts of feedback and patches over the last few months, and feeling a bit guilty about the fact that I had newer developments in place than I’d had time to organise into a formal release, I was finally prompted into doing something about it.

Those who wish to keep up to date with the latest code can check out from the public svn repository, and those wishing to contribute (which would be very welcome) can patch against the latest trunk. There’s also a wiki with an outline roadmap, known issues and such. A corresponding discussion list has also been created for those need help in using hkit or wish to discuss the development of profiles or whatever. The doors are open.

As we push towards a version 1.0 release, the key things we’ll be looking at are getting XFN cooked into the core, and really tightening up the hCard support – including detection of representative hCards, and creating a set of user documentation. If you feel you’ve got something to contribute in any of those areas, take a look at the wiki, join the discussion list and come and say hi. Any contributions are more than welcome.