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Re: Graphics and Captions

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From: Kynn Bartlett
Date: Jan 20, 2006 8:15PM

On 1/20/06, Kynn Bartlett < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Well, okay, maybe not THE stupidest.
> But one of the stupider ones I've found so far.

I take it back already.

I've found something even more stupid.

The hijacking of the <abbr> element to provide not
abbreviation/acronym expansion, but instead machine-readable date
formats:

http://www.microformats.org/wiki/datetime-design-pattern

Here's an example of it in action, from:
http://www.microformats.org/wiki/abbr-design-pattern

BEFORE:
The party is at 10 o'clock on the 10th.

WITH STUPID MICROFORMAT IDEA:
The party is at
<abbr class="dtstart" title="20051010T10:10:10-0100">10 o'clock on the
10th</abbr>.

Gosh, I tell you, I'd really love, instead of hearing "10 o'clock on
the 10th" from a screenreader, to instead hear:
"twenty million fifty one thousand ten tee ten colon ten colon ten
dash oh one hundred." Or something like that. (Go on and argue that
screenreaders are required to translate title attribute values in
quasi-ISO 8601.)

Has anyone brought this up before? I've been away. But this kind of
stuff seems terribly harmful and quite worrysome. Embedding
machine-readable strings where human-readable accessibility
information is expected to reside? Wrong, just wrong.

--Kynn