[microformats-discuss] re: Microformat for timestamp of updated content

[Ryan King]

On Aug 19, 2005, at 3:23 AM, David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:

> Just out of curiosity -- in places where I'm seeing <abbr  
> title="FORMAL-VALUE">INFORMAL-VALUE</abbr>, would we also accept/ 
> generate using the <span> or some other HTML element. I.e. I'm  
> wondering why <abbr> is always being used when "title" is available  
> on all HTML elements [1].
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/dtd.html#coreattrs

The short answer is that <abbr> has the right semantics.

The long answer is one way to view the formal-value/informal-value  
relationship is that the informal-value is (often) and abbreviated  
version of the formal value. Of course, if you really don't want to  
use an <abbr>, you can use a span like this:

<span class="dt-something">2005-08-20 07:00:00-0700</span>

Of course, that's suboptimal, because its not the most human readable  
of formats.

-ryan