Robert O'Rourke wrote:
I know it defeats the object semantically speaking but what are the
other arguments against putting the machine-readable date/time in the
class attribute and do they outweigh the gain in accessibility?
For example, what's wrong with this:
<abbr class="dtstart:2007-12-12T16:03:00Z" title="3 minutes past
4pm, 12th December 2007">
16:03
</abbr>
Leaving aside the immediate question of whether using class to hide data
is a good idea:
1. 16:03 isn't an abbreviation for 12 September 2007. That's
/additional/ information. So that should be a SPAN not an ABBR.
2. Information in TITLE is hard for humans to access (for example, with
just the keyboard, or on an iPhone). So it's best to keep important
information, like 12th December 2007, implicit or explicit in the main
content.
3. If 12th December 2007 is made implicit or explicit, then the TITLE is
superfluous and distracting:
http://www.rnib.org.uk/wacblog/articles/too-much-accessibility/too-much-accessibility-title-attributes/
http://www.rnib.org.uk/wacblog/better-connected/better-connected-better-results-top-tips-for-titles/
Since no solution is ideal with the current HTML flavours people use is
there any work being done with regard to the new HTML specs like HTML5?
A <DATE> element or data="" attribute for example?
Given that the set of data types is potentially infinite, I'd like to
see an extensible method for hiding machine-readable data in the next
version of HTML.
The current HTML5 draft, doesn't have an extensible method, but it does
include dedicated TIME and METER elements:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-phrase.html#the-time
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-phrase.html#the-meter
Caveat: a flaw doomed to irritate historians, scientists, space opera
authors, and non-Christians everywhere is that the proposed TIME element
cannot represent times before 0 AD or after 9999 AD:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-common1.html#dates
The current XHTML2 draft doesn't have an equivalent for TIME and METER,
but it does have a general way of hiding machine-readable data, using
the content attribute:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-metaAttributes.html#adef_metaAttributes_content
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
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