[uf-discuss] xfolk: tags that aren't links

[Ryan King]

On Jan 1, 2006, at 7:19 PM, Angus McIntyre wrote:

> The current spec for the xfolk microformat allows the inclusion of  
> tags in a format like:
>
> 	<div class="meta">
> 	    <a rel="tag" href="/foo">foo</a>,
> 	    <a rel="tag" href="/bar">bar</a> ...
> 	</div>
>
> This assumes that tags will always be linked to some other object.  
> However, this isn't necessarily the case: I could imagine cases  
> where a webmaster might want to provide a list of keywords  
> associated with a link, but without linking those keywords (tags)  
> to anything else.

This was a deliberate design decision in rel-tag, which has been  
covered before on this list.

-rk

> Assuming that this is desirable, what would be the best way to  
> represent this. I can think of various possibilities. One would be  
> to simply omit the anchor:
>
> 	<div class="meta">foo, bar ...</div>
>
> which conforms to the spec as it stands but means that any process  
> reading the meta block would miss the fact that 'foo' and 'bar' are  
> actually tags.
>
> A second option might be to have:
>
> 	<div class="meta">
> 	    <a rel="tag" href="#">foo</a>,
> 	    <a rel="tag" href="#">bar</a> ...
> 	</div>
>
> but this would confuse human users (i.e. the browser would display  
> something that looked like a link, but just caused the page to  
> reload when clicked).
>
> A third option would be to use 'span' instead, thus:
>
> 	<div class="meta">
> 	    <span class="tag">foo</a>,
> 	    <span class="tag">bar</a> ...
> 	</div>
>
> To me, this looks like the best option, as it marks the tags  
> semantically, but doesn't mislead the user.
>
> Anyone have any comments or suggestions, or have I overlooked some  
> existing and better way of doing this?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Angus
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com