title attribute and abbreviated class names (Was: [uf-discuss]Currency Quickpoll: Preliminary results)

[Mike Schinkel]

>> I think your use of the title attribute in these examples contains two
bad practices....

Hmm.  I see your point, and being new to this I'm learning from your
examples.  

OTOH, I also see that the proposals I first viewed as being very complex and
I'd fear many people simply won't implement them until there is a direct
benefit, and there will likely be few direct benefits until lots of people
start implementing them; a classic chick and egg problem.  Is there not a
way to significantly reduce complexity, at least in the 80 percentile case
and still maintain proper semantics?  I know I'm new and might be schooled
to understand the downside of my current view, but currentky if I had to
between the two, I'd vote for semantics that don't fit perfectly over
significantly greater required complexity per each marked up amount.

>> It's a minor problem, but it's also a minor solution - typing four extra
letters.

Point of note, my concern wasn't typing extra letters, it was the need to
transmit extra bites over the wire.  Imaging a very large volume site that
has hundreds of prices to mark up per page, and they server millions of
pages an hour. It might add up to be a concern.  For example, why does
google use "q" instead of "query" on it's search box?  I'm assuming to
reduce unnecessary characters. 
 
Thanks again for listening.

-Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: microformats-discuss-bounces at microformats.org
[mailto:microformats-discuss-bounces at microformats.org] On Behalf Of Scott
Reynen
Sent: Friday, October 13, 2006 8:34 AM
To: Microformats Discuss
Subject: Re: title attribute and abbreviated class names (Was:
[uf-discuss]Currency Quickpoll: Preliminary results)

On Oct 12, 2006, at 10:34 PM, Mike Schinkel wrote:

> Anyway, I made a proposal here:
> http://microformats.org/wiki/currency-brainstorming#Mike_Schinkel
> with the
> idea of trying to minimize the burden placed on the author of the 
> HTML, and only use lots of markup in the exceptional cases.

I think your use of the title attribute in these examples contains two bad
practices.  The first is using title outside of <abbr>, which is effectively
hiding data from humans, as this information is not human-readable in
browsers, while <abbr> title is.  The second is using title in <abbr> to
surround data that is not meaningfully equivalent to the title.  "USD" is a
good <abbr> title for "$"  
because they mean the same thing.  "USD" is not a good <abbr> title for
"$12.57" because they do not mean the same thing.  Imagine listening to that
with a screen reader set to read titles instead of content for <abbr> tags.
You'd hear "Price: USD" and have no idea what the price is, as opposed to a
clear "Price USD 12.57".  Humans first, machines second.

> My last thought on the subject, is why are we using full names for 
> currency and amount instead of "cur" and "amt" to minimize bloat when 
> hCard uses names like "fn?"

"fn" was taken directly from an existing vocabulary (vCard), so any change
would make implementation more difficult for those familiar with that
vocabulary.  Without those constraints, we should use descriptive and
human-readable class names to ease implementation and avoid name clashes.
"cur" might mean "current" in another context,  
and this ambiguity is a problem for both publishers and parsers.   
It's a minor problem, but it's also a minor solution - typing four extra
letters.

Peace,
Scott
_______________________________________________
microformats-discuss mailing list
microformats-discuss at microformats.org
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss