Drew,
On 20/9/2006, "Stephen Paul Weber" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Considering the fact that many tagclouds are based on actual numerics
(ie, 50 bookmarks on this tag), it might be nice to have access to
that information further than just a rating. imho, styling is not
the
microformat's job, the implementor can add extra classes or whatever
to make that work if title isn't good enough for that.
It's true that styling is not the job of a microformat, but we must
seriously consider how it would be styled. If there's not a practical
way to style the tag cloud, no one will use it and we'd all be wasting
our time.
I'd have to concur with that. When considering what I felt was, and
subsequent discussion demonstrates is a reasonably tricky issue, that
of how to properly markup the weights, or popularity of tags, I kept
in mind
1. appropriate use of HTML
2. what developers are likely to actually adopt, based on an analysis
of current practice, my anecdotal knowledge of widespread current
practices, and a straw poll of some developers I know
One important aspect of the latter is stylability. The title
attribute of a link if styled with attribute selectors, won't
actually appear styled in any current released version of IE for
Windows. So to my mind that excludes using title (at least alone)
because tagclouds would be effectively useless for the majority of
todays web users, and so what developer would use title for this?
It's an interesting issue. In the case of some microformats, for
example rating is hReview, or XFN, it's not that big a deal. But
tagclouds are somewhat different - the visual nature of them is a
strong driver of their appeal.
This raises a secondary issue, straight from the uf process
http://microformats.org/wiki/process#Propose_a_Microformat
If I looked at this microformat in a browser that didn't support CSS
or had CSS turned off, would it still be human-readable?
Are this format's elements stylable with CSS?
In the first instance, in one sense it would be readable - you could
read the words. But in a sense, no, as the meaning of the tagcloud is
lost - we just get an alphabetical list of words with no indication
of how they compare with one another in terms of say popularity - or
whatever the cloud represents.
Are they stylable with CSS? Well, title is stylable thusly
a[title="vv-popular"] {}
But as observed elsewhere, as IE 6 and older on windows do't support
it, is it in reality stylable?
so, in fact, "styling is not themicroformat's job" does not entirely
reflect at least the published process of developing a uf
Thanks Drew and Stephen for the thoughtful comments
j
John Allsopp
style master :: css editor :: http://westciv.com/style_master
blog :: dog or higher :: http://blogs.westciv.com/dog_or_higher
WebPatterns :: http://webpatterns.org
Web Directions Conference :: Sydney September 28-29 :: http://wd06.com
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