On Oct 14, 2006, at 3:42 AM, Mike Schinkel wrote:
I think your use of the title attribute in these examples
contains two
bad practices....
Hmm. I see your point, and being new to this I'm learning from your
examples.
OTOH, I also see that the proposals I first viewed as being very
complex and
I'd fear many people simply won't implement them until there is a
direct
benefit, and there will likely be few direct benefits until lots of
people
start implementing them; a classic chick and egg problem. Is there
not a
way to significantly reduce complexity, at least in the 80
percentile case
and still maintain proper semantics? I know I'm new and might be
schooled
to understand the downside of my current view, but currentky if I
had to
between the two, I'd vote for semantics that don't fit perfectly over
significantly greater required complexity per each marked up amount.
We should minimize complexity, but not at the expense of clear useful
semantics. Without clear useful semantics, there's no point in
microformats. Your examples seem to leave a lot of ambiguity about
what things mean, and this reduces the benefit of use, which will
hurt adoption. Small businesses don't want to get a bunch of
payments submitted in the wrong currency because some parser guessed
wrong. A microformat should leave no room for guessing.
It's a minor problem, but it's also a minor solution - typing
four extra
letters.
Point of note, my concern wasn't typing extra letters, it was the
need to
transmit extra bites over the wire.
This is also a good goal, but also a lower priority than clarity.
Microformats are going to require some amount of additional markup.
There's no getting around that. Reducing this markup by making the
class names more ambiguous isn't worth it.
Imaging a very large volume site that
has hundreds of prices to mark up per page, and they server
millions of
pages an hour. It might add up to be a concern.
Do you know someone who actually has this problem?
For example, why does
google use "q" instead of "query" on it's search box? I'm assuming to
reduce unnecessary characters.
Take a look at the HTML source of any Google page. It's full of
comments that don't provide any functionality at all, and inline CSS
and JavaScript, which could be cached separate from the HTML to
significantly reduce bandwidth. I see no evidence unnecessary
characters is a real concern for Google. And I don't see any other
high-volume sites doing this kind of micro-optimizing for bandwidth.
Peace,
Scott
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