[uf-discuss] Re: DOM scripting as an alternative to include-pattern?

[Michael Leikam]

Brian,

I realize that supporting DOM manipulations would change
how microformat parsers work.  It's easy to simply pass the
page's source code through and XSL transform, but that
doesn't strike me as a reason not to move towards
supporting a more robust way of manipulating the DOM in the
future.

The fundamental "problem," which popped up in hResume,
seems to me to be that human readability is at odds with
machine comprehension in cases where data ought to be
repeated in order to produce a complete microformat chunk,
but doing so in the source code would create a burden on
human writers and readers.  The same issue exists across
all microformats.

I brought up client side parsing not to imply that
sever-side parsing is irrelevant, but to say that there's
already a well-known and robust way to copy precise parts
of the DOM and insert them in precide locations.  Web
developers are already familiar with javascript and the DOM
spec is well understood.  I just didn't know if it had been
considered as a possible way to address the "problem" of
discontinuity between human and machine comprehension.


> --- HTML already offers some lesser known semantics that
> we have
> employed to help in situations like this. In an HTML
> table[2] there
> are several addition attributes such as AXIS, HEADER, and
> ID [1] all
> of which microformats parsers can use, similarly to the
> include-pattern, to include additional data from other
> parts of the
> table. This doesn't solve 100% of the mark-up problems,
> but it gets
> you alot closer without having you use <object>s

Yeah, those could be useful for my schedule of classes. 
I'd also like to see SCOPE[3] included since it's necessary
for ADA compliance and is complementary to the AXIS
attribute. 

However, table markup is the exception rather than the rule
for most of my pages and while it provides a way to pull in
table headers, the vevent's summary field should really be
a combination of the course title (which is outside the
table) and section number (which is header content).  Like
you said, it gets us some of the way, but I think explicit
DOM manipulations can get us all the way.


-ml

[3]
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html#adef-scope


> -brian
> 
>  [1] -
>
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar-brainstorming#Tabular_event_calendars
> [2] -
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html#h-11.4.1
> 
> -- 
> brian suda
> http://suda.co.uk
>