[uf-discuss] locality sans adr;abbr for state/country etc?

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 1/16/06 2:40 PM, "David Janes -- BlogMatrix" <davidjanes at blogmatrix.com>
wrote:

> brian suda wrote:
>> David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:
>> 
>>> If you were to do this (I'm not saying it's a good or bad idea)
>>> wouldn't you do it the other way, with the machine readable data
>>> inside the title?
>>> 
>>> <abbr class="region" title="CA">California</a>,
>>> <abbr class="country" title="US">U.S.A.</abbr>
>> 
>> 
>> except by definition of the ABBR element, the text node is the short
>> form. So it would have to be
>> <abbr class="region" title="California">CA</abbr>
>> 
>> you could do
>> 
>> <span class="region" title="CA">California</span>
>> 
>> and that is both valid HTML and the microformat parser should use
>> "California" in this instance.
>> 
> 
> Isn't this the opposite of datetime-design-pattern though?

No.  The reason we were able to use <abbr> like this for dates and times is
because the  *human* use of dates and times is almost always an
abbreviation, and the *computer* version (i.e. ISO8601) is almost always a
complete expansion.

> I'm thinking 
> here ... maybe we're operating under different assumptions ... of CA is
> a computer readable form, not as an abbreviation.

The "region" is simply a string.  There is no reason for a separate
computer-readable form, therefore we avoid it.

In general microformats avoid separate forms for humans and computers
because of the DRY principle.  We make an exception for date-time info only
because of a greater principle, which is humans first, machines second.

Thanks,

Tantek