[uf-discuss] Re: Precise Expansion Patterns

[Andy Mabbett]

In message <C0A8D575-1BB5-42DD-A823-FAB26BA0BB3C at eatyourgreens.org.uk>,
James O'Donnell <jim at eatyourgreens.org.uk> writes

>
>On 16 Dec 2007, at 04:28, Paul Wilkins wrote:
>
>> <span class="duration" title="PT2M23S">2:23</span>
>>
>> With this it is not possible to prevent the title from being used by
>> screen readers and other people who hover their mouse over the time
>> value. The title is purely to provide machine readable information
>> that is not humanly presented.
>
>Hi,
>
>JAWS (and, I think, WindowEyes also) reads titles on links,
>abbreviations and form controls. <span> should be safe if you want to
>hide the contents of the title attribute from a screenreader.
>
>Span seems a more pragmatic choice to me, since title on <span>
>supplements the enclosed text, whereas title on <abbr> replaces the
>enclosed text. As someone else mentioned, for a lot of these cases we
>want to annotate a piece of text with computer-parsable information.

While I understand the desire to avoid namespacing per se, in this case,
using:

        <span class="duration" title="value:PT2M23S">2:23</span>

or
        <span class="dtstart"
              title="value:20070912T16:03:00+01:00">
              4.03pm
        </span>

would render the title both more semantically accurate and
human-readable. It would also enable the users of assistive technologies
to hit the "next" button as soon as they hear "value colon" read out,
bypassing the machine-readable fragment.

Parsers "MUST" ignore titles not starting with "value;", thereby
ensuring compatibility with titles used on spans, for other purposes.

In the above "value:" is just as suggestion; the label could be
"machine-value:", "data-equivalent:", or some other such word or phrase.

This suggestion may case problems for non-English speakers, though.
Perhaps "data:" would be more internationally recognised?

-- 
Andy Mabbett
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