Hi André, On 7 Nov 2008, at 08:38, André Luís wrote:
I can see this option being adopted by people who are concerned about accessibility, while others might just go ahead and use the regular-problem-maker-of-a-pattern the datetime design pattern, preferring simplicity over accessibility. Right?
Well, first up, all web developers are supposed to be concerned about accessibility, otherwise they're not doing their job properly. I'll avoid digressing into that, though!
All optimisation patterns in microformats are valid for some purposes. Using an ABBR for country names is completely the Right Thing To Do, whilst for a timestamp it may not be. As with many methods in HTML, a degree of author interpretation of semantics will always take place, and authors will implement what makes sense to them.
There has to be an acceptance that valid HTML4 does not allow for embedding alternate-form content, so we're trying to build something that fits as logically and gracefully as we can. For me, the ‘machine- data’ value being a child of the property (a sibling of the display form) makes total structural sense.
An advantage of this pattern is that it is based entirely around neutral mark-up (span), although there is also no need to restrict it to any one element (you can use <b class="value"> if you like, or <input type="hidden" class="value"> if you want; we and our parsers shouldn't and don't care).
Using the @title attribute of this value element when the user does not want the value to be displayed is a little cludgy, but justified by the fact that it is not rendered in any browser (although that behaviour is a specification grey-area). Despite a stretch over the traditional use of title, @title is still associated with the class=value element. I think they have a valid and appropriate relationship; I read it as ‘the title of the value is 2008-11-07’. It's not as strong a relationship as the inner-text, but it's not nonsense, either.
There is also a viewpoint that @title should only be for human consumable data. I agree and subscribe to this viewpoint. But in this mark-up pattern, the @title of an empty element is never exposed to ANY human in any way — that has been tested by the lovely James Craig of Apple, who has confirmed that empty <span>s do not get exposed to screen readers (although empty <abbr> elements can). Thus, I think the benefits and grace of the structure justify that exception. This is also the line of exception I would make when writing coding standards.
Ben _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
