On 3 Jul 2008 at 9:54, Guillaume Lebleu wrote:
> Bob, assuming that screen readers only read out the content of abbr's > @title, this solution looks promising (I've tried with VoiceOver, but > the title content is ignored.) > > The only problem of course is for human content authors who are > effectively asked to write the same information 3 times in 3 different > formats (not very DRY)! Agreed. So, based on Scott Reynen's observation that these 'date entities' don't need to be displayed (either visually or aurally) I propose that we dispense with the <abbr> tag altogether (and, IMHO, the semantic value of the date expansion). We move on, the BBC publishes hCalendar again, and someone gets around to developing a genealogy microformat now that the date issue is settled. > BTW, on the use of abbr for dates, I've researched a number of style > guides such as [2]. It seems that "2/03/2005" is legitimate as an > abbreviated form of the inline format "February 3, 2005". > [2] > http://web.mit.edu/comdor/editguide/style-matters/date_time.html#dates I'm not sure that any particular style guide is authoritative. I had a look around some other sources, and while they mostly agree there's enough variation to make any date-parser author shudder in fear. A most disturbing trend is the use of spelled out dates, eg. "the sixth of July 2008" [1]. A humourous aside: I create computer systems validation documentation for a European consulting firm. Oddly enough, they've decided on the American date format MM/DD/YY for all their systems documentation, not the ISO date standard. My documents are constantly being returned to me for invalid dates -- my first inclination is to always write the date as YYYY-MM-DD, and DD/MM/YYYY as a second inclination. Even MM/DD/YYYY gets returned as an invalid date. Participation in the Microformats community hasn't helped my professional career :-) --Bob. [1] National Geographic Style Manual: DATES http://stylemanual.ngs.org/Intranet/styleman.nsf/024cc3c609acdb02852 56648004af446/f0d90cec94e539c78525668a006dacd0?OpenDocument or http://natgeodatestyle.notlong.com for the word-wrap challenged. -- -- -- -- Bob Jonkman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://sobac.com/sobac/ SOBAC Microcomputer Services Voice: +1-519-669-0388 6 James Street, Elmira ON Canada N3B 1L5 Cel: +1-519-635-9413 Software --- Office & Business Automation --- Consulting _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss