[uf-discuss] Microformats and RDFa not as far apart as previously thought

[George Brocklehurst]

On 24 Jun 2008, at 17:03, Manu Sporny wrote:

> Like Edd stated in his post, we have a bug that we need to fix (abbr
> design pattern causing screen reader usability issues) and that has  
> been
> hanging over our heads for some time now. BBC's decision is a lesson
> learned but is in no way some sort of sign that Microformats is on  
> it's
> way out.

Is it worth revisiting Tantek's original suggestion of using the  
object element to represent dates? [1]

The idea was to do something like this:

	<object data="20050125">January 25</object>

 From what Tantek said on his blog, the main reason for not using  
objects was that they were not well supported in Safari. However,  
Safari's object support is now much improved: fallbacks are supported  
and display:inline and intrinsic sizing will work correctly.  Safari  
2.0.2, which came out in November 2005, was the first version to  
contain these improvements [2].

It might be that there are other reasons for not using <object> that  
I've missed (I'm fairly new to the wonderful world of Microformats)  
and it might be that there's still a significant population of Safari  
users on 2.0.1 or older, but if not this could be a way forward that  
gets around the <abbr> issue.

Just a thought,
G

[1] http://tantek.com/log/2005/01.html
[2] http://webkit.org/blog/32/webkit-fixes-in-safari-202-mac-os-x-1043/