[uf-discuss] Re: One more shot at accessible hCalendar

[Toby Inkster]

Charles Belov wrote:

> Remember that any page these occur on would presumably have a language
> specification such as "en-us" so computers would be able to deal with
> standard month and day of week names and abbreviations.

I'm sorry, but this sounds like a really bad idea. Parsers would need to
maintain translation tables for day and month names, plus abbreviations
for them, plus some sort of heuristic for figuring out the language of the
page. (In practice, many authors leave out lang/xml:lang attributes, and
Content-Language headers.)

Andy Mabbett's proposed "data:" prefix already solves the abbr design
pattern accessibility issue and can be implemented in just a few lines of
code. All we need to do is build support for it into parsers. (Cognition
has supported it since alpha2.1.)

Closest thing to a "specification" for the prefix:
http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2008-February/011583.html

-- 
Toby Inkster
<mailto:mail at tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>