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Re: address tag

for

From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Feb 20, 2007 2:40AM

> That's a rather hypothetical benefit, though. It's a "if we
> had richer semantics, and UAs actually understood them, there
> would be an accessibility benefit" type argument.
> Microformats are one way to add richer semantics, but the
> same argument can be made for XForms, XHTML extended/mixed
> with other XML flavours, etc. Granted, with microformats, the
> advantage would be that it's probably backwards compatible.

Microformats also take less effort to use, and because of this, they
have had good uptake even without decent user-agent side processing.

Because of the uptake, people are actually building user agents to use
them:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mozilla_does_microformats_firefox3.
php
(or: http://tinyurl.com/yeqlou)

Even now, if you add microformats to an events listing, you can then add
a link to 'subscribe' (e.g. at the bottom of
http://ukwindsurfing.com/events/).
(NB: I'll be changing the <abbr> to <span>, due to the title issue. I
don't think it's an issue now, but it could be.)

I've not looked into the capitalised 'Semantic Web' implementations, but
I'm guessing that from a developer point of view it's not that easy to
do the same? Personally, I would do whatever works best for the user. At
the moment Microformats is in the lead for usefulness.

Kind regards,

-Alastair

--
Alastair Campbell | Director of User Experience

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