[uf-discuss] Re: Show Microformat Brainstorming

[Charles Iliya Krempeaux]

Hello,

On 12/6/05, Charles Iliya Krempeaux <supercanadian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,

[...]

> So, the orthogonal concepts here seem like:
>   * there's the concept of a "preview" image.  (maybe thumbnail would
> be a better name.)
>   * there's the concept of a "show"
>   * there's the concept of a "teaser"
>   * If it is a teaser there is a "Pay to View" link
>   * show can divided up into multiple contiguous files
>   * teaser can be made up of multiple files
>   * alternatives of the same media

There's some stuff related to this on the wiki:
  http://microformats.org/wiki/alternates-examples
  http://microformats.org/wiki/alternates-brainstorming

To me,, I get the impression that the favorite for speciying a set of
alternate links to the "same" thing is something like:

    <ul class="alternates">
        <li><a href="clip.mpeg">MPEG</a></li>
        <li><a href="clip.ogm">OGG</a></li>
        <li><a href="clip.avi">AVI</a></li>
    </ul>

Now, from the point of view of reusing existing HTML elements that
already have the proper semantics, I agree that at first that this
does seem like a good idea.  However, it seems to have some problems:

#1: You can't have loosely coupled alternatives.
#2: Without some pretty fancy CSS styling, this is really going to
mess up people's webpages.  (This will probably be a "show stopper"
for some people.)

For those 2 reasons, I'm more inclined to go with something like:

    <span class="alternates">
        <a class="alternate" href="clip.mpeg">MPEG</a>
        <a class="alternate" href="clip.ogm">OGG</a>
        <a class="alternate" href="clip.avi">AVI</a>
    </span>

That way you could do stuff like:

    <p>
        To help software handle RSS properly you should use RSS
Disposition Hinting (<span class="alternates"><a
href="http://advogato.org/article/852.html" title="RSS Disposition
Hinting Proposal">Advogato version</a>, <a
href="http://changelog.ca/log/2005/08/21/rss-disposition-hinting-proposal"
title="RSS Disposition Hinting Proposal">ChangeLog.ca 
version</a></span>).
    </p>

If you wanted to be lazy, you could even do the following:

    <p class="alternates">
        To help software handle RSS properly you should use RSS
Disposition Hinting (<a href="http://advogato.org/article/852.html"
title="RSS Disposition Hinting Proposal">Advogato version</a>, <a
href="http://changelog.ca/log/2005/08/21/rss-disposition-hinting-proposal"
title="RSS Disposition Hinting Proposal">ChangeLog.ca  version</a>).
    </p>

(Don't know what people think of the class names I'm using.  They may
or may not be too generic.)

>   * you can combine all these
>
> Did I miss anything?

[...]


See ya

--
    Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.

    charles @ reptile.ca
    supercanadian @ gmail.com

    developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/
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