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Re: address tag

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Feb 20, 2007 4:00AM

On Tue, 20 Feb 2007, Alastair Campbell wrote:

> For who? I'm very interested to know of any user-agent that actually
> reads out the title on an <abbr> element. Given IE's lack of support
> for the element in general (which most UAs build on), I'm sceptical
> there is one.

Well, Mozilla, Opera - and IE 7. They display the title attribute value on
mouseover.

> I realise they *should* provide an option to read out titles on an
> <abbr>, but I don't see the use case for supporting <span>s.

Whether you see a case or not, <span title="..."> _does_ cause the title
attribute to be displayed - even on IE 6, so in that sense it makes things
worse _if_ you are abusing title (the attribute for an advisory title) for
microformat trickery.

>> That is, it helps nobody but hurts many.
>
> Oh come on, people with an app that supports subscription (a rapidly
> increasing number) can subscribe to the calendar, receiving updates
> without even visiting the site.

You're misreading the meaning of "it". It referred to what was discussed
just above it, the title attribute trick.

Regarding subscription to the calendar, I don't know anybody who would
want to do such things, but my point about it was the very cryptic nature
of the subscription link. The text certainly looked discriminatory, and it
did not even give a hint of what could be subscribed to (and hence what I
miss if I'm in the crowd that doesn't use the products mentioned).

Technically, if you wish to let people ask for information about updates
to a calendar, you could simply let them subscribe to a service that sends
announcements (with links to the current version of the calendar).
Certainly email announcements (properly written) are more accessible
than things that rely on specialized data formats and particular products
that process them. Even if you think that some xxx format is better
(at least for some people), you're doing things in quite a wrong order if
you first implement it (even if you don't actually fail to implement the
more robust approach).

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/