[uf-discuss] Appeal for Issues: Empty spans in value-excerption-pattern

[Scott Reynen]

On [Nov 7], at [ Nov 7] 12:40 , Rob Crowther wrote:

> 2008/11/7 Scott Reynen <scott at randomchaos.com>:
>> Not as a valid dtstart value, no.  The title attribute is only  
>> parsed when
>> the value element is empty, so that would parse with an invalid  
>> dtstart
>> value containing the entire sentence.  See:
>>
> Sorry, I mucked up my copy and pasting, this is what I meant:
>
> <span class="dtstart"><span class="value" title="2008-11-04"></span>
> Barack Obama was elected the first African American president of the
> United States of American, and he was really pleased about it, on 4th
> November 2008</span>
>
> Basically I'm not clear how forcing the empty element to be the first
> thing guarantees that it will then be close to the plain text date.
> Forcing it to be anywhere would seem to guarantee there are situations
> where it can't be close to where the plain text date is if the
> original example is valid, because it's easy enough to have that
> sentence the other way around.

It only minimizes drift in the context of good markup, i.e. classes  
surrounding only the content they actually describe.  In the context  
of bad markup, such as your example where "Barack Obama" is improperly  
labeled as "dtstart", this doesn't really help.  But it doesn't really  
hurt either.  The root of the markup drift here has nothing to do with  
the "value" class and everything to do with the "dtstart" class.  The  
above should (and in most cases easily could) be:

> Barack Obama was elected the first African American president of the
> United States of American, and he was really pleased about it, on  
> <span class="dtstart"><span class="value" title="2008-11-04"></ 
> span>4th
> November 2008</span>


Peace,
Scott