[uf-discuss] Hcalendar in bbc.co.uk/programmes

[Robert O'Rourke]

Ciaran McNulty wrote:
> On Dec 13, 2007 3:19 PM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
> <bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Robert O'Rourke wrote:
>> 1. 16:03 isn't an abbreviation for 12 September 2007. That's
>> /additional/ information. So that should be a SPAN not an ABBR.
>>     
>
>   

That was Benjamin's comment not mine. I suggested a human readable TITLE 
including the full date aswell as 16:03 and putting the machine-readable 
date format into the CLASS attribute but that was also a bad idea (too 
much accessibility etc...). That said I think it's better than putting 
the machine readable date/time format in the TITLE. Surely the parsers 
should be better able to figure that out from the human readable date 
and time and leave 2007-12-12T16:03:00Z out altogether? I know of at 
least one Perl module that does this [1]

> I'd disagree with this.  16:03 in the context of your original page
> *will* refer to 16:03 on a specific day (I'm finding it hard to think
> of a non-contrived example where it wouldn't) - it's just abbreviated
> to 16:03. A human would gather that information from context but it's
> more explicit in the machine-readable version.
>
>   

That was exactly my point when I wrote my example down. If putting 
machine-readable information in TITLE isn't good then perhaps it was a 
reasonable alternative re. accessibility, but of course there are many 
arguments either way. To quote Angus:

> "title" on "abbr" (or "span") looks like the least bad of a set of bad
> choices.

[1] http://search.cpan.org/~gbarr/TimeDate-1.16/lib/Date/Parse.pm