[uf-new] hAudio Issue Duration

[Toby A Inkster]

> <span class="duration">1 hour 3 minutes 23 seconds</span>
> or this
> <span class="duration">1 heures 3 minutes 23 secondes</span>
[...]
> Numerical value and thus text  (words) are striped as they are nothing
> to do with the value, they are only there for a human to understand
> would leave us with...
> <span class="duration">1  3 23</span>


It becomes a bit more murky with:
<span lang="und" class="durarion">1 quux 2 xyzzy</span>

This gets reduced to "1 2". But is this PT1H2M or PT1M2S? It could  
even be PT1H2S or a very long recording which is P1DT2H! NLP is not a  
nice solution for this kind of thing. And for reasons I've outlined  
before, a solution which *looks* like NLP will be mistaken for NLP by  
publishers and you'll end up with an NLP arms race between publishers  
and parsers.

For people concerned with the accessibility of ISO durations, I'd  
suggest allowing duration to take *either* and ISO duration *or* a  
length in seconds, optionally followed by whitespace then "s", the SI  
abbreviation for seconds. e.g. the following would both be valid:

<p class="haudio">This song is <abbr title="PT3M23S"  
class="duration">3 minutes, 23 seconds</abbr> long.</p>
<p class="haudio">This song is <abbr title="203 s" class="duration">3  
minutes, 23 seconds</abbr> long.</p>

The limitation of course would be that this alternative syntax only  
allows times to be expressed in seconds, but I think that for many of  
the use cases of hAudio (i.e. songs) it would represent an  
improvement in accessibility.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail at tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>