Jeremy, While certainly I am swayed by many of your well reasoned arguments, I must point out one particular flaw:
1. Not backwards compatible with existing microformatted non-abbr elements. On 4/28/07 2:12 PM, "Jeremy Keith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'd also like to point out one of the beauties of the proposed title- > design-pattern: it's completely backwards compatible with the abbr- > design-pattern. The abbr-design-pattern uses the title attribute of a > *specific* element: the title-design-pattern uses the title attribute > of *any* element. This is not entirely correct. Being backward compatible with microformatted abbr elements is only *part* of the backward compatibility problem. There other part is being backward compatible with existing microformatted non-abbr elements, which is where the problem is. The problem is that there are already *non* abbr elements out there that contain microformatted information in the element text *and* a title attribute that is informational (e.g. for a tool tip). That is, they already have a title attribute which is *not* machine readable information, and if you were to *grow* the abbr-title semantic to any-element-title, then you would all of a sudden get a bunch of noise as tooltip text was picked up where the contents of the element were intended. I've seen these in numerous examples in the wild, and if there is dispute on the existence thereof, can document as necessary. 2. Too big of a change. As illustrated by the backward compatibility case above, this may be too big of a change. The other point that has been made that the title attribute on HTML4 elements in general (excluding abbr, acronym) is meant for the author to provide "advisory information about the element". http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.4.3 One important (deliberately designed) aspect of the abbr-title usage is that it specifically limited the extent to which additional semantics were implied to *only* the abbr element, and thus minimized the "damage" that was being done to the title attribute as a whole. Even then I hesitated before proposing it, and only after exhausting what I thought were perhaps other workable alternatives (e.g. object, and yes, Safari's marketshare was significant enough to cause Yahoo to pull object-include-pattern support, so others made that distinction as well). Generalizing this overloading of the title attribute to *any* element seems like a really bad idea from the perspective of minimal change. If on the other hand, you were to simply extend the abbr-title pattern to *one* other element (rather than *all* non-abbr elements), then the additional damage would be less than were you to extend it to all elements. The obvious candidate given the examples used for demonstration is <span>. There may be other elements that can be used for this purpose however, that are used less often than <span>, and semantically meaningless (perhaps purely presentational - thus being fair game for semantic repurposing, like <b> maybe). I don't have a specific proposal here, other than pick one element rather than all, and then I think it gives the other-element-title pattern a better chance. And though it may seem odd that I'm simultaneously arguing against the proposed title-design-pattern and attempting to improve it, even if I am against a particular proposal, I would much rather attempt to improve it in good faith, for the benefit of having the best possible proposals be discussed, than not. Thanks, Tantek _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
