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address tag

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From: Penny Roberts
Date: Nov 30, 2006 4:10AM

A (CMS) page that I recently inherited is mostly italics because it is
a contact page and the author used address tags not just for the address
itself but also for names, e-mails, phone numbers and fax numbers
(presumably on the grounds that they are all addresses in a contact
context).
This got me thinking about the use of the address tag and I found this
really interesting discussion on SimpleBits:
<http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2004/08/04/sq.html>;
Most of the discussion is about the presentation with only a few
comments specifically mentioning accessibility so I'd like to hear what
people on here feel on the issue.
There is a lot to read so I'll distil it into some questions that I'd
particularly like some thoughts on:

Is the address tag good for accessibility? (Some comments felt that it
was not semantically correct as the W3C specs only mention its use for
contact details for the author of the document.)

Should the address tag also be used for phone, e-mail and fax: would
this help accessibility or hinder it?

Since the address tag displays as italic in many (most?0 browsers should
it be styled to remove the italics or are they OK in short lines?

Should each line be in a pair of tags or should the whole address be
inside one pair?

If only one pair of tags is used what about line breaks? (Very
interesting point in a couple of comments that in this case breaks are
not presentational they are content (punctuation) therefore the use of
<br> is not only OK it is necessary to be semantically correct.)

Penny