[uf-discuss] Human and machine readable data format

[Jeremy Keith]

Martin McEvoy wrote:
> semantically on their own the above does not mean much nothing at all
> really, search engines, parsers, things that index dates and times,
> would have to peek at the parent to find out what the actual values  
> are
> for.

But that's true already of any instance of the value class name.  
Parsers and spiders already have to perform look-ahead searches for  
any elements with a class of "value" wherever they come across any  
microformat class names (summary, location, fn ...everything basically).

http://microformats.org/wiki/value-excerption-pattern
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-parsing#class_value_handling

I should probably add links to those pages from:
http://microformats.org/wiki/parsing-microformats
http://microformats.org/wiki/parsing

Anyway, my point is that search engines and spiders already need to  
perform this look ahead if they are extracting microformats. If they  
are just searching for dates and times, then you're right, the class  
name "value" by itself doesn't say much (although the presence of  
hyphens or colons says everything) but I'm not aware of any spiders  
that are indexing datetime information outside of the context of events.

> I don't think the above suggestions are anything ground breaking or  
> new
> just a natural expansion of the current design pattern.

I think that, where possible, we should avoid thinking up new class  
names. Sometimes it's unavoidable but in this case, we can reuse an  
existing pattern.

Bye,

Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Keith

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