I'll try to keep this to new comments concerning the use of the ISO date in the hCalendar microformat. Please excuse me if I'm repeating something. At the moment, these are the things that would prevent me from implementing hCalendar on our website.
----- Site visitor accessibility: Even if a particular screen reader can disable abbreviations or titles so as not to hear ISO-format dates read, that means that screen reader would also not read human-friendly titles that have nothing to do with microformats. Even if your site does not use human-friendly title tags, there are sites "in the wild" that do, and having the screen readers suppress these would be a loss. Possible alternatives: If the webmaster does use an empty span with a title tag to contain the ISO date, the webmaster could add a style="display: none" attribute to it to ensure that screen readers did not read it. ----- Site creator accessibility: 1. We have non-technical people creating and editing static HTML web pages using Adobe Contribute. There is no easy way in Contribute to insert a title tag. 2. Even if I were to be able to create a kludge to let the people enter a title tag, they would still have to create human-unfriendly ISO dates in those title tags. 3. These non-technical people would have to deal with a human-unfriendly spec that end dates without times end at the beginning, not the end, of the day in the ISO date. Possible alternatives: These tags could optionally be used in place of the class="dtstart" and class="dtend": class="dtstartyyyy" for year class="dtstartmmm" for month as Jan, Feb, etc., or 01, 02, etc., or 1, 2, etc. class="dtstartdd" for day as 01, 02, etc. or 1, 2, etc. class="dtstartdow" for day as Mon, Tue, etc. or Monday, Tuesday, etc. class="dtstarttime" for time as 10:12am, 10:12a, 10:12 am, 10:12 a, 1012, 10:12:01am, etc. Remember, these are humans entering these dates and they may not be consistent (as long as they don't misspell the month or day, the computers ought to be the ones who are forgiving). Replace start with end for human-unfriendly end date (ends at start of day 12:00:01am if no time given) or endfull for human-friendly end date (ends at end of full day 11:59:59pm if no time given) or startend or startendful for something that is used for start and end both. Example: Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 4:08pm would be human-friendly encoded for a start date as <span class="dtstartdow">Tuesday</span>, <span class="dtstartmmm">May</span> <span class="dtstartdd">13</span>, <span class="dtstartyyyy">2008</span>, <span class="dtstarttime">4:08pm</span> Tuesday, May 13, through Friday, May 16, 2008 would be human-friendly encoded for a start and end date as <span class="dtstartdow">Tuesday</span>, <span class="dtstartmmm">May</span> <span class="dtstartdd">13</span>, <span class="dtstartyyyy">2008</span>, through <span class="dtendfulldow">Friday</span>, <span class="dtendfullmmm">May</span> <span class="dtendfulldd">16</span>, <span class="dtstartendfullyyyy">2008</span> While I as webmaster would have to provide pre-set fill-ins for the non-technical content editor to drop a date into the pre-formatted span tags, it would protect the non-technical content editor from having to deal with the code. For example, in Contribute, I would code a template containing a table with repeating regions wrapped by the span tags. The non-technical content editor would drop a day-of-week, month, date, year, and time into the spaces provided. Remember that any page these occur on would presumably have a language specification such as "en-us" so computers would be able to deal with standard month and day of week names and abbreviations. ----- Hope this helps, Charles Belov SFMTA Webmaster http://www.sfmta.com/webmaster _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
