On Sep 4, 2007, at 12:26 PM, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:
<tr class="vcard geo">
or is that naughty? :-)
I actually do stuff like that all the time... for things like
signatures... it makes it very compact... for example...
-- <a class="vcard fn n url" href="http://changelog.ca/";>Charles Iliya
Krempeaux</a>
(It makes it so I don't have to add any extra tags... like <span>'s...
and adding hCards is as simple as just adding classes.)
I've heard some people complain because... my impression was... that
they weren't sure how to style it... but, for example, if you wanted
to style the url of an hCard, you could with...
Styling is only one practical problem (IE 6, still the most popular
browser, doesn't support multi-class selectors). More importantly,
I'd say, is the theoretical problem of hierarchy semantics. HTML
defines hierarchy by nesting of elements, so that's what microformats
do. Putting several classes together in a single element identifies
the content of that element as belonging to each class, but it
doesn't tell us anything about the hierarchy of those elements. With
the markup above, how do we know if FN is a property of vCard or
vCard is a property of URL? As the number of atomic microformats and
the ways in which they might be nested in each other expands, this
will move from a theoretical to a practical problem.
We could certainly define our own method of establishing hierarchy,
e.g. order of classes, but HTML already has a method that generally
works well. In the above example, only one extra <span> is needed to
clarify that vCard is the container for the other properties. With
tables (and lists) HTML's hierarchy method doesn't work as well
because there are nesting limits imposed (e.g. nothing is allowed
between <tr> and <td>), but I think we should more thoroughly
investigate alternative solutions to this problem (e.g. colgroups),
before reinventing the wheel on hierarchy semantics.
Peace,
Scott
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