communications log, "tel" microformat? (was Re: [uf-discuss]Paving the cowpaths?)

[Simon Kittle]

> On Thu, 2005-11-24 at 10:25 -0800, Tantek Çelik wrote:
> > In the mean time, as Ryan King as pointed out, there is nothing 
> > stopping you from simply marking up your phone calls using semantic 
> > class names, which you could re-use from hCard, to note the 
> phone number in particular, e.g.:
> > <span class="tel">+1.415.555.1212</span>
> 
> I know there are various groups on the Internet, all wanting 
> to encode the information of the world into their scheme. 
> This is a neat microformat approach, but an alternative might 
> be to use a telephony URI[1]. The number above might be 
> represented instead as something like:
> <a href="tel:+1.415.555.1212">+1.415.555.1212</a>

That's an interesting idea which I'm not really sure I'm qualified to answer
in a definitive way.  However, my first thoughts on it would be:

consistency: If all the other data being marked up is defined as class
atributes then it would be inconsistent and a little inconvenient to have
one of the things marked up in this way.

The other thing would be in the prinicple of "going with what works now":
putting a telephone in an anchor tag like that would obviously mean it's
displayed as a valid, navigate-able link which would be confusing (and
possibly annoying?) for users who then might try to click on the link.
Maybe this point will be moot in 2 or 3 years if peoples PC are hooked into
their phones as a defacto standard, but I think if I was to visit a website
now and every telephone number was a hyperlink to a browser error message
I'd probably be a little fed up before long.

- Simon