[uf-discuss] Re: Putting microformats on the BBC iPlayer

[Andy Mabbett]

On Tue, March 4, 2008 15:53, Toby A Inkster wrote:

> The fact is that the microformats datetime design pattern (and to a
> lesser extent, the ABBR design pattern) suffers from major accessibility
> problems. This has been known about and discussed for over 18 months,
> with various alternatives being proposed, some of which have been pretty
> bad, but others which look very sensible. Probably my favourite so far was
> Andy
> Mabbett's recent suggestion on this very list <http://microformats.org/
> discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2008-February/011583.html> which I have
> implemented <http://buzzword.org.uk/cognition/> and found to be no more
> difficult to parse than the ABBR pattern.

Thank you for confirming that.

> However, despite a lot of proposals having been put forward, the
> community seems to have been very reluctant to actually bless one.

True; that applies to other issues equally, too.

> It is
> fair enough to take time to consider these things carefully before issuing
> an edict (perhaps if that had been done to begin with we would have never
> ended up with a broken datetime design pattern), but while the community
> dithers over deciding upon a replacement, more and more instances of this
> inaccessible pattern are deployed.

Quite - and, as I've pointed out before, the imminent release of Firefox
3, with native support for microformats, will see a significant leap in
public awareness of microformats.

-- 
Andy Mabbett
** via webmail **