I think I just worded that poorly. I probably should have said,
"I need to display the following information, and store it semantically."
I am not looking to pass the information to machines per se, but I know that
it will be read my machines such as search engines and screen readers. I am
seeking the most ideal way for the information to be stored, then I will
worry about displaying it with CSS. So while I could simply place each
piece of information in it's own DIV, that would be a step back from where I
want to go. A DIV does not convey any meaning, other to indicate that there
is a division of some sort, often in display. A dt/dd will at least convey
that you have some specific idea that you are defining. In this case, a
machine knows that the "posted by" is "Chris Harrington", in much the same
way that an email client can tell me the date, sender, and subject of an
email.
Paul
-----Original Message-----
Chris Harrington
Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:51:43 -0800
Hi Paul,
What do you mean by "display semantics". Do you need a non-human to consume
the information? If that is the case, then I'd use RSS. If your display
semantics are for a web brower, then use markup which is CSS friendly.
Something like
<div class="post">
<a id="a1234"></a>
<h2 class="postTitle">Title of post</h2>
<div class="postMetaInfo">
<div class="postCategory"><span>Posted category:</span>
Alert</div>
<div class="postTopic">Weather</div>
<div class="postDate"><span>Posted date:</span>
12/13/2005</div>
<div class="postAuthor"><span>Posted by:</span> <a
title="About This Author" href="http://www.activeinterface.com";;>Chris
Harrington</a></div>
</div>
<div class="postBody">
<p>Locals were shocked today when..</p>
</div>
</div>
With the DIVs you can decide (in CSS) how it gets layed out
With the SPANs you can decide (in CSS) what annotation text you (don't) want
to display:
DIV.postMetaInfo DIV.postCategory SPAN {display: none;}
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