Tantek Çelik wrote:

To be frank - the blog post on hAccessibility WaSP was seriously flawed.
1. It used a strawman example to argue against.

What about our example was a straw man? Just yesterday it was mentioned that Yahoo uses dates without dashes and wikevent was given as an example of using the "slightly better dates with dashes." Let's use wikevent's "in the wild" example (that includes timezones) and talk about what happens with the date portion of this ISO string: "2007-05-07T20:00:00+01:00."

I don't have Jaws in front of me, but the time is either going to be read as "twenty o'clock zero zero plus one o'clock" or as "twenty zero zero zero zero plus one o'clock." Both are nearly useless to human ears.

2. It recommended known unworkable solutions (using object? are you kidding me? that's already been tried and failed - did you not do your homework? see my original abbr post, and include-pattern-feedback). In addition I told James Craig *in person* about this at SXSW, so I was a bit surprised it
still made it to the blog post.

As Andy pointed out, the point of the article was not the proposed solutions, but I want to point out that your reason for being hung up on the object example is because it was "tried and failed" due to UA implementation bugs. The argument you're making here completely contradicts the argument you make later in this same email here (quoted, but out of order):

OTOH, not allowing bugs and stubbornness of implementers to retard/ slow/stop
progress and nor taking a step backward and using span instead.

[...]

However, I'm against contorting microformats because of bugs or suboptimal
behaviors in <1% marketshare browsers.

I don't really consider screen readers as "browsers." People who use <1% market share browsers have a choice to change or upgrade. The people who use screen readers really have no other way to access online content. Yes, they could turn off the title attribute verbosity, but this would then cause ambiguity of understanding other, valid uses of abbr.

I doubt you would agree with the following statement:

"I'm against contorting building code regulations to require wheelchairs ramps and elevators in public buildings because of the <1% of citizens with mobility impairments."

So I'm for adding "-" and ":" to get a better and even *usable* result in
screen readers,

I agree with you that the date portion (yyyy-mm-dd) with dashes, though sub-optimal, is better. I told you this in our discussion at SXSW. I also immediately mentioned that's only the case with dates, not datetimes. The complete ISO timecode is gibberish with or without punctuation; I completely deny your claim that it's "usable."

I think there needs to be a balance.

I agree. I know we all have the specifications' best interests in mind, and I'm glad it's finally in full discussion.

James


_______________________________________________
microformats-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss

Reply via email to