Hi all. I was reading through http://www.webstandards.org/2007/04/27/haccessibility when a possible solution to that problem occurred to me. I've tried looking through the list and wiki but haven't found a similar suggestion; however if it's a been brought up before... apologies in advance.
To cut to the chase: why not use <input type="hidden" /> fields to store metadata that must be machine-read within microformats? It would avoid stretching the semantics of existing tags and (I believe) avoid issues with screen readers. Besides, it's what the tag is for... Here are a few more thoughts: - <input> elements don't require being within a <form>. They do require being within a block-level element in XHTML for validation. The spec (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/forms.html#h-17.2.1) mentions that "...elements used to create controls generally appear inside a FORM element, but may also appear outside of a FORM element declaration when they are used to build user interfaces." - If they are within a <form>, they can be submitted (which might be a desired effect) or not (by adding the disabled="disabled" attribute). - To my knowledge, no user agent renders <input type="hidden" /> fields. Easily accessible via JS or any other parsers though. - For identification of an element we could use the "name" attribute (which can be repeated in the same page), or a class. Or it can be inferred from its parent node. Here's a half-baked, not-well-thought-through, example of how this could be used to solve the hCard (or any other datetime) issue: <div class="vevent"> <a class="url" href="http://www.web2con.com/";>http://www.web2con.com/</a> <span class="summary">Web 2.0 Conference</span>: <span class="dtstart"><input type="hidden" value="2007-10-05" />October 5</span>- <span class="dtend"><input type="hidden" value="2007-10-19" />19</span>, at the <span class="location">Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA</span> </div> Another possibility is to discard the <span>s altogether: <div class="vevent"> <a class="url" href="http://www.web2con.com/";>http://www.web2con.com/</a> <span class="summary">Web 2.0 Conference</span>: <input type="hidden" name="dtstart" value="2007-10-05" /> <input type="hidden" name="dtend" value="2007-10-19" /> October 5-19, at the <span class="location">Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA</span> </div> Good? Bad? Evil? -- Nelson Menezes [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ microformats-new mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new
