i think the abbr pattern is a valid one. moving the unambiguous timestamp to some place humans can't see it is asking for it to be removed be a third party (whether that is a screenreader, an html sanitizer, or a web browser makes little difference.) and of course in some cases you can get away with not using abbr:
Q1 '07: <span class="dtstart">2007-01-01</span> through <span class="dtend">2007-04-01</span> with hyphens it's reasonably human-readable. i've been using fully punctuated iso 8601 date notation it everyday life (checks, contracts, even announcements) for years with no problems whatsoever. (e.g. 2007-03-12) this seems suitable for use in an abbr title. however, the combined datetime notation is a bit awkward due to the 'T' and time zone suffix (the former needed for separation from date and the latter needed for disambiguation -- the problem is that time zones are not widely understood regardless of notation.) treating whitespace as a field separator and so allowing <date> <time> to be equivalent to <date>T<time> removes one of the complaints, and forcing the human-readable timestamp into GMT/UTC eliminates another (microformats and other broadly-consumed data should probably default to GMT when no timezone is specified.) however this leaves us with the still-difficult problem of explaining a time from another timezone. maybe we need a dhtml widget to localize times for display, while allowing the page to contain only GMT/UTC? anyhow, sorry for the slightly-off-topic brainstorming, -ben On 5/2/07, Ben Buchanan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> So, I started this response thinking "How does a full-string timestamp /not/ disambiguate a March 2 date in the following?" My answer is: by not being human-readable :) The example in the original post shows the problem: <abbr class="dtstart" title="20070312T1700-06"> March 12, 2007 at 5 PM, Central Standard Time </abbr> When vocalised, that title is less useful than the text it potentially replaces (screen readers may read just the text, just the title or both). Perhaps I should have said "effective disambiguation, for all human users". At any rate, I think the main problem was referring to different examples - in yours, the shorter date probably would make sense to all users and yes it disambiguates. The datestamp in the microformat however, does not disambiguate for humans. ...and I think I've used up my quota for "disambiguate", so I'll end there ;) cheers, Ben -- --- <http://weblog.200ok.com.au/> --- The future has arrived; it's just not --- evenly distributed. - William Gibson _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
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