[uf-discuss] value-title feedback

[Martin McEvoy]

Hello All,

I have been trying to implement the value-title pattern over at 
GetSemantic [1] (The next version of Transformr) and stumbled across a 
problem.

Simply adding a space eg: <span class='value-title'> </span> still 
results in HTML-Tidy discarding the value as suggested here: 
http://microformats.org/wiki/value-class-pattern#Parsing_machine-data_value-title, 
because Tidy (by default) drops all empty elements, with no character data.

here is a live example of what happens,

source: http://microformats.org/2009/10/06/recently-2009-09

markup: <a title="Permanent Link to Recently in microformats: 2009-09" 
rel="bookmark" 
href="http://microformats.org/2009/10/06/recently-2009-09" class="updated">
<span title="2009-10-06T16:19:10" class="value-title"> </span>
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 4:19 pm</a>

after tidying : 
http://cgi.w3.org/cgi-bin/tidy?docAddr=http://microformats.org/2009/10/06/recently-2009-09

<a title="Permanent Link to Recently in microformats: 2009-09" 
rel="bookmark" 
href="http://microformats.org/2009/10/06/recently-2009-09" 
class="updated">Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 4:19 pm</a>

The only way I have found to stop this from occurring is either don't 
use tidy, which in some cases makes the source document impossible to 
parse if the html is invalid, or add a &nbsp; instead of a space eg:

<span class='value-title'>&nbsp;</span>

which seems a little unintuitive to me. ....hmm?

Thanks

-- 
Martin McEvoy

http://weborganics.co.uk/

"You may find it hard to swallow the notion that anything as large and apparently inanimate as the Earth is alive."
Dr. James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia