[uf-discuss] class="url"?

[Siegfried Gipp]

Am Sonntag, 5. November 2006 13:59 schrieb Chris Casciano:

> I think I've also seen this behavior desired quite a bit more with
> hcard then I have with hcalendar... where you will often have the
> hcard container element spanning a fair amount of textual content.
> Sometimes the footer element, sometimes some copy with URLs that
> really shouldn't be attached to the user directly, and sometimes just
> a lot of 'random' stuff (use case of the authors card in a footer
> wrapping other meta info like rel="license", links to the validator
> or software apps home page.. or even text linked keyword advertising
> links). Though that might not be the optimal markup, I would push
> back strongly against assuming any more meaning to a link that
> doesn't have any explicit attributes.

Well at least the meaning of a link _is_ that it contains a url in its href 
attribute. This is the basic meaning of a link, without any further markup, 
any class or id or other attributes. It is already specified that way.

> As for class="url" vs. class="alternate" I'm not sure the value in
It's not really "versus". The meanings and purposes are different. 
> that vs. multiple instances of "url". Is there a parsing issue or
> translation issue into one of the external formats that this would
> help along? It sounds useful and certainly adds more meaning on the
> markup side, but I'm not sure how it helps once the item has been
> imported or extracted.

The problem shows up, if you have a hCard or vEvent record containing more 
than one link, and only one of these links is really related to that record, 
the others are, as cou called it, random data. Well, i think, that such a 
hCard or vEvent record, from the beginning of the container marked with 
class="hcard" resp. class="vevent" up to the end of that container should 
only contain data relevant for the hCard or vEvent record, plus just filling 
material. 

Let's take hCard as example. There is the possibility to include more than one 
telephone number. It would be possible to add "alternate" to all but one of 
them. But the hCard specification already has better markup, specifying the 
type of the telephone number. Still, alternate would be an idea if you 
specify more than one telephone number of the same type. But i'm not sure of 
how to export that to VCARD.

Now what about the url in hCard? What does it contain? There are different 
possibilities of a url. One might be some http://www.bla.blub which points to 
the home page. The homepage is a valid field in VCARD. So o.k., you might 
consider to put this into the hCard record:
<address class="vcard">
    <span class="url">http://www.bla.blub</span>
</address>
This would be a perfect legal use of hCard and the url property. It's just 
that it is not very useful. Or at least you could enhance usability much by 
not using the <span> element, but the <a> element. Thus you might consider:
<address class="vcard">
    <a class="url" href="http://www.bla.blub">http://www.bla.blub</a>
</address>
Still perfectly legal. And indeed this container contains a url. And usability 
is enhanced by providing a clickable link.

But what about not putting the written url onto the page? But instead writing 
the text "homepage"?
<address class="vcard">
    <a href="http://www.bla.blub">Homepage</a>
</address>
This is valid, and through using the <a> element the content of the href 
attribute is by specification a url. So adding class="url" to that link is 
simply redundant. And: This container does not contain a url, instead it 
contains the text "homepage".
REM.:Is there a specification in VCARD to specify which kind of url this is?

Next: There are other types of urls. What about this:
<address class="vcard">
    <a class="email" href="mailto:someone at bla.blub">email</a>
</address>
Still legal. But still, the class="url" is not only unnecessary but not 
appropriate, since the container dies not contain an url, it contains the 
text "email". 

So exploring this, class="url" would only make sense in two very different 
cases:
1. You really include a url within the container.
2. You define that "url" does not mean a general url, but specifically the url 
to the "homepage". This would be a matter of definition and should be 
clarified. In this case, "homepage" would be the better class name, but since 
the VCARD specification already uses url, i think it's better to stick to 
that. Although then url as defined here would have a different meaning than 
url defined at the w3c. It would be possible, but should be clarified.

regards
Siegfried