On 28 Jun 2008, at 17:03, Ed Lucas wrote:
George Brocklehurst wrote:
Is it worth revisiting Tantek's original suggestion of using the
object element to represent dates? [1]
The idea was to do something like this:
<object data="20050125">January 25</object>
This particular example is invalid, as the data="" attribute must
contain a URI, and a URI cannot start with a number.
display:inline and intrinsic sizing will work correctly. Safari
2.0.2, which came out in November 2005, was the first version to
contain these improvements [2].
For note, I don't feel that CSS support on an element should be of
consideration when designing microformats. We are operating at the
HTML level and must not produce techniques which depend on them
(although documenting techniques where CSS can be used to enhace/alter
microformats is still valuable, I'm simply meaning that HTML+CSS must
not ever be the primary solution to a problem).
It might be that there are other reasons for not using <object>
that I've missed (I'm fairly new to the wonderful world of
Microformats) and it might be that there's still a significant
population of Safari users on 2.0.1 or older, but if not this could
be a way forward that gets around the <abbr> issue.
I'm normally just a lurker here, but no-one has replied, so...
Using the object element seems like a very sensible solution. What
are the blocking issues now that Safari handles it?
So, one solution I saw offered to the URIs-can't-start-with-numbers
issues was to do everything as a URL fragment, converting it to:
<object data="#20050125">January 25</object>
That, however, causes Safari 3 to render a box of the current page
within the OBJECT element, and so would introduce a CSS dependency to
keep it hidden. No good, I fear.
*However*, the following appears to be well behaved inline in Safari
2.04 and 3.1.1, Firefox 1, 1.5, 2 and 3, and Opera 7, 8 and 9.
<object class="dtstart" data="data://20080712"></object>
That uses the DATA URI scheme, which without a specified mime type and
charset, defaults to text/plain;chartset=US=ASCII. I think that would
be sufficient.
I've pastied my test case, and would be grateful if people could test
the behaviour in Internet Explorer: http://pastie.org/224023
Given that IE has a history of abysmal support for OBJECT and no
support for data: URIs… I have no idea what might happen.
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data:_URI_scheme
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2397 (data: spec)
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt (URI spec)
B
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