Manu Sporny wrote:
There are really two questions that we're attempting to answer here:
1. Can we make screen readers not read the @title, of whatever element
we choose, out loud?
2. Do we care that "PT2M23S" will appear if the person browsing hovers
their cursor over the text denoting the duration, if that is the only
way we can successfully utilize ISO standards in the Microformats
community?
I think it's clear that with a bit of testing we can find a markup
pattern, albeit not necessarily a pretty one, where human-hostile data
is not read aloud or shown on hover.
It wouldn't make it any less of an abuse of the underlying standard for
TITLE, however.
Here's another question that needs asking. How much real-world value
does the use of the ISO standard for date time representations actually
add in this /particular/ case (hAudio duration)?
From what I've seen, there are two reasons you would want to hide a
machine-friendly representation of human-friendly content:
1. The human-friendly content has so many variations, usually
locale-related, that it would be challenging to write an algorithm to
parse them all (e.g. datetime formats).
2. The human-friendly content is less precise than a machine-friendly
format (e.g. "next Wednesday" instead of a precise date time, "London"
instead of geo coordinates).
In both cases, it would be hard for parsers to produce useful data from
the human-friendly content.
How often do these reasons apply to hAudio duration?
How many authors who use digits to represent durations do not use Arabic
numerals, or not use familiar units like seconds? How many do not use
digits at all, instead employing words like "three minutes and
twenty-three seconds"? How many provide fuzzy durations like "about
three minutes"?
The impression I get is that the majority of cases would be served fine by:
<span class="duration"><span class="minutes">2</span>:<span
class="s">25</span></span>
We could still think about specifying a TITLE hack for people who do
need human-friendly content in a form that cannot be expressed in the
above markup (perhaps if a piece of audio was being described in a
paragraph rather than the usual tabular or list formats), but I suspect
the above would be sufficient in most cases, e.g.:
http://www.top100.cn/Product/Product.aspx?productid=S0093820000
What do we think?
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
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