[uf-dev] Using class for non-human data (original) (raw)
Frances Berriman fberriman at gmail.com
Fri Jun 20 03:40:40 PDT 2008
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Hey all,
Firstly, with my BBC hat on, I wanted to point out that our Standards and Guidelines group have recently added a few additional clauses to our semantic markup standards. They are as follows (I don't think the most recent document is available yet, but I'll certainly link through to it when it's available):
-- 5.1. Title attributes MUST contain human-readable data.
8.1. You MAY use microformats on your site where there are agreed specifications (refer to the Microformats community wiki site for details) with the exception of those that use the title attribute of HTML's abbr element. 8.1.1. Some microformats use the abbr element to conceal machine-readable data; for example, date-times and geographical coordinates. For screen-reader users that expand abbreviations they will hear the full date-time or coordinate; for example 2008-05-15T19:30:00+01:00 instead of 19:30. 8.1.2. If you want to use microformats in the abbr element you MUST first discuss this with the Editor, Standards and Guidelines. 8.2. If you do use microformats, you MUST ensure that the title attribute contains human-readable data. See also Title attributes above.
Consequently, we've been looking at the machine-data proposals in the hope that we'll be able to keep using things like hCalendar. After having a chat with Ben about that document, we (myself and colleagues) have these additional concerns with the proposed solution:
- The empty tag causes potential problems in CMS implementations (i.e. some of our tools, for example, will publish instead of the desired empty element).
- Using two elements for one job.
- The data is not discretely associated with what it should be surrounding.
- Future proof? What if screen readers did start to implement always expanding title attributes, even on empty elements?
Additionally, we felt a concern about using empty elements could encourage bad practices and also with our new (but not necessarily irreversible) guidelines about the contents of title attributes, we're a little stuck.
Being that our main concerns centre around the questionable use of "title", we've been looking at the idea of using "class" instead. Something along the lines of:
10 o'clock on the 10th
The pros to this would be that it's non-harmful and the HTML spec does suggest that user-agent data may be stored in class. On the downside, the semantics again could be questionable (but arguably less so than the semantics of title).
What I'm interested in talking about is what other problems arise from using "class". Can it be used, should it be used and what problems could there be from the parsers point of view? Have we missed something fundamental about why we don't already use the class attribute more often?
I'll create a wiki page for this shortly (any preference where you'd like this to live, anyone?). Just wanted to get this out there.
Cheers :) F
-- Frances Berriman http://fberriman.com
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