[uf-discuss] Re: Precise Expansion Patterns

[Martin McEvoy]

On Sun, 2007-12-16 at 12:28 +1300, Paul Wilkins wrote:
> On Dec 16, 2007 11:52 AM, Martin McEvoy <martin at weborganics.co.uk> wrote:
> > The empty <a></a> although valid, seems nasty to me and a little anti!,
> > microformats are supposed to represent the data they contain...are they?
> 
> 
> As I was saying, this is why there has been so much debate about this
> and it's why compromises will have to be made if we're to achieve our
> end result.
> 
> The elements haven't been designed for what we are trying to use them
> for. As such, there will be situations where the only other solutions
> have differing levels of tradeoffs.
> 
> For example, you can use the following which gives no title display in
> both Firefox and IE, but it's largely a hack.
>     <span title=""><a title="PT3M23S"><span title="">3:23</span></a></span>
> 
> A simple statement of fact is, if you don't want titles to be
> displayed then don't wrap them around content.
> Humans first and machines second. The empty anchor before the content
> appears to fulfil that nicely, more-so than other attempts.

OK Paul, lets try and put that in the real world, My client has a music
store with around 500 pages of content and around 10 to 20 items of
hAudio on each page, My client want's their pages to validate and be
accessible.. no problem i say, semantic markup... and SEO,  semantic
markup... we can sprinkle some hAudio magic in there I say .. great my
client says because they trust me im good at my job, I do the job, my
boss looks at my work and says "what are all these empty anchors
about"... pause right there... any SEO worth his salt will know anchor
text links that go nowhere, will A, reduce the quality of out going
links from your site so reducing PR (Page Rank) and B, more than likley
get you banned from google because it will think you are trying to spam
it.... you know what my boss will say....you are sacked.

so no thank you Paul although your idea is workable, its still a hack,
and in the real world never likely to be used.

Thanks

Martin
>