[uf-discuss] invisible content OK?

[David Osolkowski]

On 9/3/07, Catherine Devlin <catherine.devlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> One question I haven't seen addressed is whether it's considered good
> practice to hide information from the as-displayed webpage while
> including it in the microformat.  For instance, I may be making a
> chatty, informal blog entry - "We're gonna meet at noon this Wednesday
> over tacos at Joe's".  I want to make it a full, rich hCalendar entry
> for those who actually want to pull down a vCard for Joe's, yet I
> don't want to break up the chatty, informal flow of my narrative-style
> post by visibly including a lot of detail - Joe's zip code, etc.
>
> ...
>
> Is there a better way?  Should I not be doing it at all?

Think of it this way: do you want someone reading the page to be able
to find the address of Joe's?  If so, that address should not be
hidden.  The issue then becomes how to show the address without
interrupting the narrative flow, not whether to show or hide it at
all.

One solution could be to put the full address for Joe's in a footnote
and reference it in the post using the include-pattern.  If the
include-pattern is too confusing or doesn't work, you could just leave
the full hCard in a footnote and leave it up to the user to realize
"oh, there's a reference to a footnote after Joe's, and there's an
hCard here, so that must be the hCard for Joe's."  Thus, the full
address is still visible to the user, regardless of what technology
they use, without interrupting the post with unnecessary detail.