alternates-brainstorming

Introduction

This page is to talk about alternates, that is, places where a user may be given several different items to choose amongst that at some logical level are considered equivalent. The best stawman so far is #6.

Discussion Participants

Editor

• David Janes, BlogMatrix, Inc.

Authors

• David Janes, BlogMatrix, Inc.
• Lucas Gonze
• Greg Borenstein
• KevinMarks

Interested Folks

• Joshua Kinberg
• Ernest Prabhakar

Brainstorms

Strawman 1

<fieldset>
 <a href="example.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">MP3 alternative</a>
 <a href="example.wav" type="audio/wav">WAV alternative</a>
 <a href="example.mov" type="video/quicktime">MOV alternative</a>
</fieldset> 

XHTML Sample

Discussion

• is legal but warps XHTML definitions -- David Janes
• I think that is fieldset abuse -1 KevinMarks

Strawman 2

   <select id="entryN">
     <option value="example.mp3">MP3 alternative</option>
     <option value="example.mov">WAV alternative</option>
     <option value="example.wav">MOV alternative</option>
   </select> 

XHTML Sample

Discussion

• is legal but warps XHTML definitions -- David Janes
• butt ugly, probably beyond redemption -- David Janes
• the alternatives aren't clearly links -1 KevinMarks

Strawman 3

<div class="altgroup">
 <a class="alternate" href="example.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">MP3 alternative</a>
 <a class="alternate" href="example.wav" type="audio/wav">WAV alternative</a>
 <a class="alternate" href="example.mov" type="video/quicktime">MOV alternative</a>
</div> 

Discussion

• Looks better, but we have an existing rel="alternate" in HTML

Strawman 4 (lists)

An example of a list that expresses no preference.

<ul class="altgroup">
 <li><a href="example.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">MP3 alternative</a></li>
 <li><a href="example.wav" type="audio/wav">WAV alternative</a></li>
 <li><a href="example.mov" type="video/quicktime">MOV alternative</a></li>
</ul> 

An example of a list that expresses a preference (i.e. first is best, last is worst)

<ol class="altgroup">
 <li><a href="example.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">MP3 alternative</a></li>
 <li><a href="example.wav" type="audio/wav">WAV alternative</a></li>
 <li><a href="example.mov" type="video/quicktime">MOV alternative</a></li>
</ol> 

Discussion

• this rocks, though I'm a little indifferent to altgroup. The only downside is that 'loosely coupled' alternates may not be covered; on the other hand, this may not be so much of an issue. We will know more from the examples -- David Janes
• I like this a lot, and the ul/ol distinction is good, but the rel="alternate" should be there too.

Strawman 5 (lists explicit alternator)

This varies #4, explicitly stating what is being alternated. Let's say we're trying to express "location". If there was no alternates, we'd just say:

<a href="example.mp3" class="location">MP3</a>

Now, let's say that we have multiple choices. Here's what I think it should look like:

<ol class="location alternates">
  <li>
    <a href="example.mp3" class="location">MP3</a>
    <br />
    I ripped this one using <a href="...">iTunes</a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a href="example.wma" class="location">WMA</a>
    <br />
    I ripped this one using <a href="...">Windows Media</a>
  </li>
</ol> 

Discussion

David Janes:

• "alternates" indicates there's a bunch of choices to follow
• "location" appears multiple times because ...
• "location alternates" indicates we're _composing_ the alternates MF with "location"

Lucas Gonze:

• I fiddled around with CSS and javascript to support this and found it was pretty easy to work with. That's a big plus.
• A drawback is that it departs from existing idioms for microformats.
• A plus is that the same method can be applied to other variants of the Alternates microformat. Let's say you have some MF that depends on a class "photo" to distinguish which one of multiple IMG elements is the alternate, you can declare the OL or UL with class="photo alternates".
• Another plus is that the technique can extend out to more than one item per option, like if there must be both a photo and a location; that would be