title attribute and abbreviated class names (Was: [uf-discuss] Currency Quickpoll: Preliminary results)

[Scott Reynen]

On Oct 12, 2006, at 10:34 PM, Mike Schinkel wrote:

> Anyway, I made a proposal here:
> http://microformats.org/wiki/currency-brainstorming#Mike_Schinkel  
> with the
> idea of trying to minimize the burden placed on the author of the  
> HTML, and
> only use lots of markup in the exceptional cases.

I think your use of the title attribute in these examples contains  
two bad practices.  The first is using title outside of <abbr>, which  
is effectively hiding data from humans, as this information is not  
human-readable in browsers, while <abbr> title is.  The second is  
using title in <abbr> to surround data that is not meaningfully  
equivalent to the title.  "USD" is a good <abbr> title for "$"  
because they mean the same thing.  "USD" is not a good <abbr> title  
for "$12.57" because they do not mean the same thing.  Imagine  
listening to that with a screen reader set to read titles instead of  
content for <abbr> tags.  You'd hear "Price: USD" and have no idea  
what the price is, as opposed to a clear "Price USD 12.57".  Humans  
first, machines second.

> My last thought on the subject, is why are we using full names for  
> currency
> and amount instead of "cur" and "amt" to minimize bloat when hCard  
> uses
> names like "fn?"

"fn" was taken directly from an existing vocabulary (vCard), so any  
change would make implementation more difficult for those familiar  
with that vocabulary.  Without those constraints, we should use  
descriptive and human-readable class names to ease implementation and  
avoid name clashes.  "cur" might mean "current" in another context,  
and this ambiguity is a problem for both publishers and parsers.   
It's a minor problem, but it's also a minor solution - typing four  
extra letters.

Peace,
Scott