[uf-discuss] RFC: sHTML Video Thumbnailing

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:

> On 5/27/07, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:

[snip]

>> I don't think this is a very natural use of the <q> element. A
>> thumbnail isn't really like a quote of a prose fragment. Consider
>> that you would never put a thumbnail in quotation marks.
> 
> True... but you don't have to have the <q> elements put quotes around
> the thumbnail.
> 
> Please refer to the following to see how to get rid of it...
> 
> http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007-May/009703.html 
> 
> 
> This is similar to the problem we have with using <abbr> for dates.
> 
> Some browsers put a border under the <abbr> element.
> 
> We get rid of the bottom border some browser put under the <abbr>
> element (when we use it for dates) with a little extra inline style.
> 
> We can do something similar here for the <q> element used for video 
> thumbnails.

Hmm. I think Maciej does have a strong point about interoperability 
here. Removing the quotation punctuation with CSS does not help those 
with user-designated styles or UAs that ignore such CSS: e.g. text 
browsers and screen readers. The question to ask yourself is: if you 
could not remove the quotation punctuation and layout, would you still 
use <q> and <blockquote>? If a screen reader read (for example):

quote Dorothy encounters the Lion end quote

That would be rather strange, wouldn't it? As you say above, it is 
"True" that "you would never put a thumbnail in quotation marks." This 
suggests that we should not be using <q> or <blockquote> for this.

Maybe it would be better to use something along the lines of:

<span class="video-details"><img class="thumbnail" alt="Dorothy 
encounters the Lion" src="http://example.com/thumbnail.jpg"><cite><a 
href="http://example.com/thevideo" type="video/quicktime">The Wizard of 
Ozz</a></cite></span>

>> If you want the full video to be clickable, what you might want is:
>>
>> <a rev="thumbnail" href="http://example.com/video">
>>    <img src="http://example.com/thumbnail.jpg">
>> </a>
> 
> I'm not sure if the "rev" attribute is being used correctly in your markup.

Yeah, the HTML4 spec says the rev and rel imply relationships between 
the current document and the href, not the anchor's contents and the href.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#adef-rev

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis