[uf-discuss] RE: Inline style conflict?

[EC]

 Hi,

Thanks everyone for your input, most interesting.

Again I am wondering why when the code is an hCard it has been moved in the
hCalender problematic section? Note: the hCard FAQs are different to the
hCalender FAQs and do not mention problems using display:none. Do the
microformat specifications state that the visibility of data is a necessity,
or is this a usability issue rather than a microformat markup issue?
 
I am going to remove in the near future the <img> from the hCard. It was
initially meant to be an experiment to see how the available microformat
parsers in Firefox handled the display:none style. I was aware before adding
the style the implications involved with hiding data with respect to spam,
SEO etc. I can understand that hiding data in microformats may be unwanted,
and abused.

The question is can using valid css markup (eg style="display:none") lead to

a) invalid microformat markup? or 
b) valid microformat markup that 'may' display different data depending on
user and/or is 'possibly' undesirable eg spam? If (b) is the case then
surely this isn't a microformat issue at all but the older issues of
usability and using CSS responsibly? 


TIA

Euan Cameron




 -----Original Message-----
From: EC [mailto:xymox12 at hotmail.com] 
Sent: 10 January 2007 12:02
To: microformats-discuss at microformats.org
Subject: Inline style conflict?

Hi there,

I notice the site Theatre Studies: European Theatre
(http://www.theatrestudies.llc.ed.ac.uk/) has been placed in the problem
section of http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar-examples-in-wild due to
the use of inline style (style="display:none") used within an img tag.

Here is the code in question:
<span class="vcard">
<img style="display:none"
src="http://www.theatrestudies.llc.ed.ac.uk/images/staff/scolvin.jpg"
alt="Sarah Colvin" class="photo" />
<span class="honorific-prefix">Professor </span> <span
style="font-weight:bold" class="fn">Sarah Colvin</span><br />
Email: <a href="mailto:sarah.colvin at ed.ac.uk"
class="email">sarah.colvin at ed.ac.uk</a>
</span>

I am not sure why this has been done as:
A) the img is part a hCard and not an hCalender, although both exist on the
page
B) using a correctly formatted css inline markup to hide the img from the
browser renderers cannot, surely, conflict with  microformat semantic
markup. Having read the brainstorming hCard FAQ I initially used  <span
style="display:none"></span> around the img tag - however I see no reason in
this case to add the extra markup around the img tag. ( The is the future
'Proposed
Additions'(http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-parsing#Use_of_CSS_compute
d_styles_instead_of_HTML_default_styles) but this is for text formating, as
far as I can see, so it wouldn't interfere with an img file getting parsed
correctly.)

Using the Tails (0.3.6) Firefox add-on correctly parses the microformat
content on this page including the image.

Can anyone explain why the inline css style (display:none) cannot co-exist
(ignoring the benefits of using external style sheets rather than inline
css) with the microformat semantic markup. I'm probably missing something
obvious here, so thanks for any advice. 

Cheers

Euan