[uf-discuss] Microformats and RDFa not as far apart as previously thought

[Ed Lucas]

George Brocklehurst wrote:
> Is it worth revisiting Tantek's original suggestion of using the 
> object element to represent dates? [1]
>
> The idea was to do something like this:
>
>     <object data="20050125">January 25</object>
>
> From what Tantek said on his blog, the main reason for not using 
> objects was that they were not well supported in Safari. However, 
> Safari's object support is now much improved: fallbacks are supported 
> and display:inline and intrinsic sizing will work correctly.  Safari 
> 2.0.2, which came out in November 2005, was the first version to 
> contain these improvements [2].
>
> It might be that there are other reasons for not using <object> that 
> I've missed (I'm fairly new to the wonderful world of Microformats) 
> and it might be that there's still a significant population of Safari 
> users on 2.0.1 or older, but if not this could be a way forward that 
> gets around the <abbr> issue.
I'm normally just a lurker here, but no-one has replied, so...

Using the object element seems like a very sensible solution. What are 
the blocking issues now that Safari handles it? I've run a few quick 
tests and Firefox,Opera, Safari and IE7 seem ok. IE6 won't display the 
content, but that may be an issue with my copy of MultipleIE. According 
to the Include-pattern page on the wiki ( 
http://microformats.org/wiki/include-pattern ) this may be due my to 
ActiveX being disabled/broken.

The focus seems to have drifted toward smarter parsing of dates, but the 
two nice things about the title="somethingmachinereadible" pattern were 
that it could potentially be used for other data (not just dates), and 
that it was simple enough for us muggles to understand and implement.

Any thoughts?
Ed




>
> Just a thought,
> G
>
> [1] http://tantek.com/log/2005/01.html
> [2] http://webkit.org/blog/32/webkit-fixes-in-safari-202-mac-os-x-1043/
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