[uf-discuss] RFC: Proposal for general purpose microformat

[Abramo Bagnara]

Ryan King ha scritto:
> On Dec 2, 2005, at 11:39 AM, Abramo Bagnara wrote:
> 
>> The benefits I see wrt current hCalendar are:
>> - generality
> 
> 
> This may be in opposition to the way we develop µF's. As the first µF 
> principle states: "solved a specific problem."

I'd add: "better if *this* specific problem is solved in a general way,
without complex policies and hairy details".

>> - simplicity and readability (without have to know the complex  rules of
>> hCalendar describing where the data might be located)
> 
> 
> IMHO, your rendition is no easier to read than hcalendar. Of course, 
> I'm very familiar with hcalendar, so I may be biased.

I find very hard to remember which attributes and in which prioritary
order are attempted to find the field content. In my proposal this is
explicit and also permits to avoid the @headers mess extending its
benefits to non tables (like in CSS oriented tables).

> 
>> - no overlapping with class name in use by consolidated css
> 
> 
> True. However, you do realize that using colons in class names will  not
> work well with css (with current useragents, at least, I'm not  sure
> exactly where the spec is on this)?

Good point: .xx:hover is indistinct from .xx:dtstart

What about to choose a $prefix different from "xx:"?

Can we reach an agreement that to use a "namespace" for microformats
specific classes is a good thing?

>>> Why not propose a fix to hcalendar, rather than starting from  scratch?
>>
>>
>> My proposal is exactly oriented toward this, to improve current
>> hCalendar (as you can see the similarity between the two are much many
>> than the differences...)
> 
> 
> It just seemed that you'd thrown out more than neccesary. Your stated 
> objective was to fixed the cases of encoding iCalendar parameters in 
> hcalendar (I think. I'm honestly not sure what part of the format 
> you're trying to fix.). Why not just focus on that part of the format?

See the rationale above.

I'd like you realize how many layout limitations impose current
hCalendar way.

I'll do a specific example, one of that I've found trying to add
hCalendar tagging to my application output.

Suppose that I want to group attendees by role.
With hCalendar I'm forced to this abbr abuse:

<div>
<span class="header">Optional partecipants: </span>
<span class="attendee">
  <abbr class="role" title="opt-participant"></abbr>
  <a class="cn" href="mailto:abramobagnara at tin.it">Abramo Bagnara</a>
</span>,
<span class="attendee">
  <abbr class="role" title="opt-participant"></abbr>
  <a class="cn" href="litabanelli at racine.ra.it">Licia Tabanelli</a>
</span>
</div

while with my proposal I can do the following:

<div>
<span class="header">
<abbr title="opt-participant">Optional partecipants</abbr>
</span>:
<span class="xx:attendee= xx:@role=../abbr/@title">
  <a class="xx:@cn xx:=@href" href="mailto:abramobagnara at tin.it">Abramo
Bagnara</a>
</span>,
<span class="xx:attendee= xx:@role=../abbr/@title">
  <a class="xx:@cn xx:=@href" href="litabanelli at racine.ra.it">Licia
Tabanelli</a>
</span>
</div>

So leaving the needed layout freedom to web page designer.

-- 
Abramo Bagnara                       mailto:abramobagnara at tin.it

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