[microformats-discuss] RFC: Thoughts on Video and Audio Microformats

[Ryan King]

On Oct 18, 2005, at 12:50 PM, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On 10/18/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar <drernie at opendarwin.org> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>
>>> The "class" attribute and the "title" attribute imply absolutely no
>>> semantics (as far as I know).
>>
>> Um, not quite.  Let me try to explain, though Tantek or Ryan could
>> probably do better.  First of all, you *are* correct in that the
>> preferred method is to reuse *existing* HTML semantics; the URN trick
>> is rather clever, I must admit.
>>
>> However, there's a deeper design principle at stake: human-
>> readability.   The one concern I have with URNs -- even more than the
>> fact that they are deprecated -- is that they are pretty much opaque,
>> and somewhat confusing.
>
> I like to get some clarification here.  When you say "The one concern
> I have with URNs... is that they are pretty much opaque".  Who are you
> talking about?  Opaque to who?
>
> There are (at least) 2 parties involved.  The person scripting the
> HTML code.  And the person viewing the HTML code (through their
> browser).  (You could also consider web crawlers and other "machines"
> to be parties too.  But I won't get into that here.)
>
> To the person scripting the HTML code, the "urn" attribute is no more
> opaque than the "rev" or "rel" attribute.  If we consider that using
> "rel" and "rev" is good practice (for Microformats) then I can't see
> why "urn" wouldn't be acceptable also.  (Well, if it was still part of
> the latest HTML spec, that is.)

Which it isn't. Still.

-ryan

> ...
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com