[uf-discuss] ISO Dates and Durations using Style

[Martin McEvoy]

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
> Martin McEvoy wrote:
>
>> One question what is actually wrong with using an extension eg:
>>
>> <span class="bday" style="-uf-content:'1968-01-04';">4th Jan, 
>> 1968</span>
>>
>> apart from the CSS validation issues, which when you compare it with 
>> the current <abbr> and @title accessibility issues doesn't seem so 
>> bad to me?
>
> The only direct accessibility issue I can think of is that if you had 
> a tool that stripped out styling information before presentation to a 
> user who needed to apply their own formatting, the data would be 
> stripped along with the presentational suggestions.
agreed....
>
> There are a couple more indirect considerations:
>
> 1. Encouraging non-conforming code could produce more mistakes; 
> without a quality control process, mistakes are less likely to be 
> noticed when they only affect users with certain disabilities.
yes this too....
>
> 2. It would constitute a barrier of adoption to publishers aiming to 
> produce webpages that conform to accessibility guidelines that require 
> conforming or even just valid CSS and reduce the benefits of such 
> microformats reaching users with disabilities via sites designed to be 
> usable for them. For example, a page using this syntax probably could 
> not pass WCAG 1.0 Checkpoint 3.2 ("Create documents that validate to 
> published formal grammars.") and therefore could not pass at the 
> Priority 2 level.
Nicely said thank you very informative absolutely correct also.
>
> These issues are by no means as significant as the accessibility 
> problems with abbr and title.
the lesser of the two evils so to speak.. :-)
>
> But in terms of what is wrong with it more generally, this solution is 
> every bit as non-conforming (though not quite as risky) as an HTML 
> custom attribute, with the additional ugliness of putting required 
> data into a layer intended for optional presentational suggestions.
even if they are just presentational suggestions for a parser? because 
this is practically what the abbr pattern does using @title? where would 
I put that data then? if I were copying popular usage patterns that data 
would be in the head in a meta tag referenced in some meaningful way 
(how I don't know), but  instead it seems (to me) that I have to take 
that data and place it in the content hidden in @title a cool trick!  I 
guess that's why microformats are referred to quite often now as 
"hacky". This is just my though so don't jump up and down, I am known to 
think a little out of the box, microformats can overcome their issues if 
they just accept one thing  machine data belongs in the head of a 
document, not in the content were it currently is.
> Given that HTML custom attributes are a non-starter for microformats 
> because they build on existing standards, I can't see how this 
> proposal is going to gain any traction.
It wasn't  really a proposal of any kind I am just cycling through the 
many options.
>
> -- 
> Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
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