I'm working on designing a microformat that can be used to indicate the location of VCS (git, svn, etc) repositories related to a web page.

I'd appreciate some web standards-savvy eyes on my rel-vcs microformat rfc.

If it looks good, next steps will be making things like gitweb, viewvc, ikiwiki, etc, support it. I've already written a preliminary webcheckout tool that will download an url, parse the microformat, and run the appropriate VCS program(s).

(Followed by, with any luck, github, ohloh, etc using the microformat in both the pages they publish, and perhaps, in their data importers.)

Why? Well,

  1. A similar approach worked great for Debian source packages with the XS-VCS-* fields.
  2. Pasting git urls from download pages of software projects gets old.
  3. I'm tired of having to do serious digging to find where to clone the source to websites like Keith Packard's blog, or cariographics.org, or St Hugh of Lincoln Primary School. Sites that I know live in a git repo, somewhere.
  4. With the downturn, hosting sites are going down left and right, and users who trusted their data to these sites are losing it. Examples include AOL Hometown and Ficlets, Google lively, Journalspace, podango, etc etc. Even livejournal's future is looking shakey. Various people are trying to archive some of this data before it vanishes for good. I'm more interested in establishing best practices that make it easy and attractive to let all the data on your website be cloned/forked/preserved. Things that people bitten by these closures just might demand in the future. This will be one small step in that direction.a