[uf-discuss] Use of <abbr> (also <object>) and Accessibility

[Maciej Stachowiak]

I'm replying a bit out of order here since I only just subscribed to  
this list.


In message <C138691F.7B722%tantek at cs.stanford.edu>, Tantek Çelik  
<tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> OBJECT has been problematic in Safari for quite some time, and  
> still is
> AFAIK.

I think you may be basing this on out-of-date information, as the  
current Safari 1.3 and Safari 2.0 have pretty good <object> support.

> In terms of bug-reporting, I'd suggest pointing the Safari team at  
> the draft
> HTML 4.01 test suite to *at least* pass all the test cases there.
>
>  http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Test/HTML401/current/

Many of these tests are outright wrong. For example, no browser that  
I tested, including Mac IE, passes the following test. And what it is  
testing does not appear to be at all justified by the HTML 4.01 spec:

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Test/HTML401/current/tests/sec13_3-BF-01.html

That being said, there does appear to be a genuine bug with falling  
back from img objects that point to a broken image. I filed it as

http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10992

> http://tantek.com/log/2005/01.html#d26t0100
>
> Following the descriptions contained within that post, it is  
> trivial to
> construct perhaps a half dozen or so OBJECT test cases which Safari  
> fails.

In current Safari, <object data="20050125">January 25</object> works  
just fine as expected. As to your other earlier points:

* "It doesn't handle <object> fallbacks" -- Current Safari handles  
<object> fallbacks fine.
* "it doesn't know when not to handle <object> mime types that it  
doesn't support" -- I'm not sure what this means, but you do get  
fallback on an unsupported MIME type.
* "it doesn't support display:inline on <object>" -- It certainly  
does, in fact this is the default display type for <object>.
* "it doesn't do proper intrinsic sizing of <object> replaced  
elements" -- It does for image types as long as you specify the  
content type correctly. Which I think is the only case where this is  
relevant.

It is true that a lot of this didn't work as well in previous Safari  
versions. We would also be happy to fix any remaining <object> (or  
other) bugs that impede microformat design. Please let us know if you  
have specific ones to report.

Regards,
Maciej

P.S. In the case of dates I think <abbr> is a better choice than  
<object> since <object> is much more heavyweight in terms of  
implementation. I wouldn't recommend the use of <object> unless you  
actually intend to embed content from an external resource.