Erik Vorhes writes: > On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 4:59 AM, Smylers<smyl...@stripey.com> wrote: > > > For words that you wish to have no distinct presentation from the > > surrounding text -- words that readers don't need calling out to > > them as being in any way 'special' -- simply don't mark them up. > > Interesting point. Should the HTML5 specification explicitly admonish > against using microformats, microdata, RDFa, and the like?
Possibly I stated the above too strongly. In general invisible metadata doesn't have a great history; the most successful systems involving machine-parsed web pages seem to involve machines parsing the human visible parts of pages rather than things like <meta keywords>. But I didn't actually mean to go so far as to say these should never be used. If somebody can do something useful with names marked up as metadata then that's a reason for marking it up in some way. But HTML 5 doesn't need a specific element for that; there's the generic microdata syntax. If marking up people's names when citing them becomes really common then a future version of the spec could mint an element for that (like happened with <time>, a common metadata pattern). But there still wouldn't be a call for an element which sometimes indicates its contents should be displayed to the reader in a way which indicates they are the title of a work and sometimes indicates its a person's name. Smylers
