busy day in #microformats
Last month at SXSWi, I met up with Ryan King and we seemed to be on the same wavelength about developing test cases for microformats. A couple weeks ago, we started using mercurial/hg to share microformats code, tests. I try to sync up with Ryan once a week or so. We had another busy day today.
We're still struggling a bit to shed our CVS habits and learn hg's push/pull/merge routine, but we're getting quite a bit of coding and testing done, as you can see in hg.microformats.org.
We talked a little about line lengths and tabs/indenting and various other open source housekeeping details.
I looked over some experimental code that Brian has added for <del> support. I simplified one big XPath expression and fixed a bug while I was at it, I think.
Brian's code is ahead of the specs when it comes to <abbr class="geo" title="41.9794444444;-87.9044444444"> but it works really well, in for example, the SXSWi hCalendar/hCard/google-maps mash-up so I expect it'll get added to the specs and tests.
Earlier in the week, prompted by a #swig discussion of MicroModels, i.e. GRDDL and microformats, I collected some notes in the microformats wiki on profile URIs to reflect some discussions we had in Austin.
Dan,
While the geo shorthand may not have made it into the official geo or hCard specs yet, I made sure to document it on the hCard brainstorming page when I bounced the idea off of Brian and he seemed to think it was fairly straightforward to implement. So yes, his code may be ahead of the specs, but that's because we're trying out new brainstorming ideas before committing to the spec. I actually like the fact that we make sure things seem to be implementable and work as expected before putting them in a spec. ;)
Cool stuff indeed. I have still a weird feeling about the use of title attribute for microformats. To be sure we should check with people using browsers (voice browser for example) using extensively the title attribute.
I wonder if the HTML Spec is clear too
[[[
title = text [CS]
This attribute offers advisory information about the element for which it is set.
]]]
The global structure of an HTML document
Fri, 24 Dec 1999 23:37:50 GMT
"advisory information": What does that mean?
Wordnet says:
*** Source: WordNet (r) 2.0 ***
advisory
adj : giving advice; "an advisory memorandum", "his function was purely consultative" [syn: {consultative}, {consultatory}, {consultive}]
The HTML 4.01 Specification then says:
[[[
Values of the title attribute may be rendered by user agents in a variety of ways. For instance, visual browsers frequently display the title as a "tool tip" (a short message that appears when the pointing device pauses over an object). Audio user agents may speak the title information in a similar context. For example, setting the attribute on a link allows user agents (visual and non-visual) to tell users about the nature of the linked resource:
...some text...
Here's a photo of
[A href="http://someplace.com/neatstuff.gif" title="Me scuba diving"]
me scuba diving last summer
[/A]
...some more text...
]]]
the problem with the use of title attribute in the context of microformats is that the information is less clear than the one given in the content of the element, which is somehow the other way around, it should be.
For example,
[[[
ABBR: Indicates an abbreviated form (e.g., WWW, HTTP, URI, Mass., etc.).
]]]
which in your example of "geo" class is definitely not what abbr was intented to be.
In fact I see one possibility of gracefully using something similar without abusing HTML 4.01 Semantics.
Ruby Markup is specifically used for this. And the microformats community which says that it should be easily accessible by humans make this even more useful.
Ruby Markup is content, not attribute values, which are likely to be forgotten when edited again with a visual browsers.
There's an example in the Ruby Annotation specification, with Expiration date. I think the issue that the microformat community would raise about this is.
application/xhtml+xmland nottext/html.