Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
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:
I understand that microformats are about keeping the data visible but
2007-12-12T16:03:00Z is no good to humans. The data is still visible to
machines and as far as I know it's there for the machine's benefit.
1. 16:03 isn't an abbreviation for 12 September 2007. That's
/additional/ information. So that should be a SPAN not an ABBR.
Sure I understand, it was just an example based on what was in TITLE, so
you're saying 16:03 isn't an abbreviation for 2007-12-12T16:03:00Z
either?. Ignoring the '12 December 2007' bit would it still be an ABBR
do you think? Seems a bit superfluous to treat it as an abbreviation at
all if that's the case. Taking the example of a blog post there is a
context for date and time so if 16:03 appeared there a human could
figure out it was on that day. A machine could work it out from the
information in CLASS. It seems like an impossible situation to get right...
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:
I agree with these points, so basically ABBR is the wrong element in
this case because the date/time in full is given or implied. Could it be
argued then that the machine-readable date-time belongs in CLASS on a SPAN?
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
The XHTML2 method gets my vote then, unless of course that flaw is
worked out. What a palaver...
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Thankyou for the links and response Benjamin,
-Rob
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