[uf-discuss] Chat microformat/podcast transcript

[Ben Ward]

On 4/19/06, Paul Bryson <paul at msn.com> wrote:
> One thing though, I use at least one chat program that has an option to
> condense all contiguous messages from a single author together so that it
> just displays the author once, but the timestamp of each message.
>

A couple of responses come to mind:

Firstly, that it could be acceptable to have multiple time+q pairs
within each list item, such that you might have:

<ol>
  <li><cite>Ben</cite>
      <abbr title="">12:38am</abbr> <q>First statement</q>
      <abbr title="">12:39am</abbr> <q>Additional Comment</q>
  </li>
  <li><cite>Paul</cite>
      <abbr title="">12:40am</abbr> <q>Response</q>
  </li>
</ol>

A generator application could then append ABBR+Q to the previous li
content as appropriate, thus the restriction would come out as 'one
CITE per LI with all other LI content attributable to that person'.
Which makes a certain amount of sense.

The alternative would be to say that you could potentially handle the
condensed rendering at render-time. What you're effectively
determining is the display: property of each LI > CITE. However, since
that would be dependent on the innerText of a predecessor's child,
which is well out of range of current CSS2 and proposed level 3
Selectors. Therefore such rendering would require scripting for this
kind of presentation on the web.
That's drifting off topic I think, I'm not sure how much of a
consideration that would be at this stage. With respect to
presentation though, I think flexibility (such as multiple abbr+cite)
is useful.


On a different tack (and this is not a suggestion that I especially
advocate, but I think it's valid to raise it for sake of clear
dismissal): It could be argued that each message is actually an event
in the conversation. Therefore, should there be reuse of hCalendar
here?

Ben