On May 13, 2007, at 3:13 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
On May 11, 2007, at 3:15 PM, John Allsopp wrote:
(abbr pattern problems,
Clearly, there's a need for markup for the generic pattern of
marking up a triple of data presented to humans, the microformat
class and a normalized easy-to-parse representation of the data.
HTML5 <time> addresses only one instance of this pattern.
I'm not sure it's clear that we need a general mechanism. AFAIK, the
only real problem is with datetime fields. Everything else seems to
work pretty well now.
The problem with using <abbr> for this pattern is that title='' is
intended to be human-readable and the pattern contaminates
abbreviation data, so with microformats <abbr> is now less useful
for e.g. non-microformat-aware but abbr-aware screen readers.
The question that needs to be asked is: Will microformat producers
and consumers be willing to migrate to a replacement of the abbr
pattern if one is provided or will they continue to use abbr anyway
for backwards compat?
There's no way that we'll get 100% of microformat producers to switch
to the new mechanism, but with advocacy we can get a large number to
upgrade. If producers switch so will consumers (and I'll put it in
the test suite, too :D).
For example, should HTML 5 define a uf-data='' attribute as a
common attribute such that the value of this attribute would be
considered in preference over textContent by microformat consumers?
Or should HTML 5 just mitigate the damage to the title attribute by
defining a boolean attribute title-is-uf='' for flagging title=''
attributes not meant for human consumption?
I don't think so. This fails to solve a specific problem (solves a
general problem that I'm not sure we need to solve). It also
encourages hiding data, which is Not a Good Thing(tm).
Is it too late to get rid of this?
<abbr title='uf data'>human data</abbr>
Like I said, we probably won't be able to upgrade 100% of the data in
the wild, so consumers will still have to support it, but we can
probably get a lot.
Would this be accepted by the uf community?
<span uf-data='uf data'>human data</span>
Like I said, we should focus on specific problems and solutions, of
which <time> does a great job of solving the the datetime-in-abbr-
title issue.
If not, would this be backwards-compatible with uf consumers?
<span title='uf data' title-is-uf>human data</span>
Consumers would all have to be updated. So while it's backwards
compatible with existing content, it isn't future compatible (if you
started publishing this before consumers were updated, your content
would not be handled correctly).
-ryan
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