[uf-discuss] Best practice for the abbr pattern

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 4/27/07 10:47 AM, "Dr. Ernie Prabhakar" <ernest.prabhakar at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Jeremy,
> 
> On Apr 27, 2007, at 9:49 AM, Jeremy Keith wrote:
>> However, the datetime can also be written with dashes and colons
>> like this:
>> 
>> title="2007-03-12T17:00:00"
>> 
>> http://microformats.org/wiki/datetime-design-pattern
>> 
>> Would everyone agree that, for the sake of screen reader users, we
>> should update the wiki to strongly encourage this more verbose
>> version of datetimes and strongly discourage the contracted version?
> 
> Can you confirm that:
> 
> a) This will in fact solve the screen reader problem

That's much too big a request ;)

It's also unnecessary.

As long as there is improvement, it is worth the change.

And the improvement is reading it as "two thousand seven [pause] three
[pause]... " etc. rather than  "twenty million ...".



> b) This still conforms with all the relevant W3C recommendations

ISO8601 is an ISO standard, not W3C.

That being said, the W3C *note* (not recommendation) date and time which is
a profile (subset) of ISO8601:

http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime

actually recommends using the "-" and ":" separators explicitly.

I will add an informative reference accordingly to hCalendar for better
reference findability.


> If so, then I'd agree with you, as the hyphenated version is also
> more human-readable, and thus seems in keeping with microformat
> philosophy.

Yes the "hyphenated date is more human readable than unhyphenated" argument
has been before, and as you say, is preferred per microformat principles.

Thanks,

Tantek