From: "Rickards, Julian (NDM)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Microformats Discuss" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2007 12:10 AM
Subject: RE: [uf-discuss] Question about telephone numbers
Thanks Paul for your reply but I have two issues with your statements at
the bottom.
1. I proposed the title attribute to store the telephone type and you
replied that the "title attribute isn't workable with microformats ...
unless it is [in] the abbr tag". My issue with this is that the title
attribute is a Core attribute and may be used in any tag. Therefore, it
should be possible to store this type of information in the title
attribute without requiring the abbr element. The fact that the hCard
specification doesn't allow or support this is another issue but it
should be possible.
Because something is possible doesn't mean that it's a good idea.
Microformats are designed to be applied on pre-existing information, and if
any of that information has title attributes already applied to it, we don't
want that information to mistakenly flow over into the microformat itself.
2. I have never seen reference to anything in the Microformats
specifications that suggest that styling microformats must be compatible
with all browsers which is the only reason why you might want to
consider attribute selectors. Therefore, I don't think that browser
compatibility for attribute selectors should be a valid reason not to
use the title attribute to store the phone type.
I'm thinking about styles that may want to be applied to the abbr tag. IE
just won't allow this to occur.
However, as I was thinking about this during this morning, I realized
that microformats do offer an alternative, even if it isn't spelled out
as part of the hCard specification for the telephone component and that
is to use multiple classes. It is perfectly legal (and required in some
instances) to use class="fn n", this pattern could be extended to be
used as class="value work" and class="value home" etc.
For example:
<div class="tel">
<div>Toll-free Phone: <span class="value
voice">1-800-567-7890</span></div>
<div>Toll-free Fax: <span class="value
fax">1-800-567-0987</span></div>
</div>
This technique is in danger of overloading the already crowded class name
space. The number of class names that are used should be kept to a minimum.
The current format forces us to include "voice" or "fax" in text rather
than in the attributes. In my original case, I didn't want to include
the word "voice" in the text because in the contacts page I was/am
creating, all of the numbers were voice numbers (all of the people in
the contacts page share a single fax number so I didn't need to specify
a fax number for each and use "fax" and "voice" to distinguish them for
each person).
The other problem I will encounter is the fact that because my efforts
are on our government web pages (in Ontario, Canada, all government
pages must be in both English and French), I must use the French
equivalent to "voice" and "fax" in the text which means that the
microformat will be broken. However, if "voice" and "fax" were accepted
as attribute values, then I don't need to worry about the text in the
page because the attribute value would be used instead of the text.
This was covered recently, and general consensus is that the abbr design
pattern is the most appropriate choice on resolving such issues.
<abbr class="type" title="fax">Téléc</abbr>
--
Paul Wilkins
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