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Thread: address tag
Number of posts in this thread: 11 (In chronological order)
From: Penny Roberts
Date: Thu, Nov 30 2006 4:10AM
Subject: address tag
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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
From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Thu, Nov 30 2006 4:40AM
Subject: Re: address tag
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> Is the address tag good for accessibility?
I would say it's fairly ambivalent at the moment with regards to
accessibility. Not harmful, but not useful either.
With regards to 'should I use it?', I would split this into three
questions:
1. Is there anything useful about address tags for accessibility in the
specs? (No.)
2. Do any current user agents do anything special with it? (Not that I
know of.)
3. Is there any likely future use? (Unlikely.)
For questions one and two: It is a tag with a confusing past, which has
lead to it being used in different ways, and User-Agents not making any
use of it.
The address tag would seem appropriate for the type of uses that
Microformats are being used for, such as being able to copy contact
information from a web page straight into your addressbook.
The reason I don't think it is likely to be much use in future is that:
- Microformats don't use it for marking up addresses (see why here:
http://tantek.com/presentations/2005/09/elements-of-xhtml/#slide5).
- HTML 5 doesn't specify it as general contact information markup
(http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-address)
- Neither does XHTML 2
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-structural.html#sec_8.1.).
Both HTML 5 & XHTML 2 define it as contact information for the document
or section of a document.
Since that isn't the general use that most people consider it for
(marking up contact information), it is unlikely to be utilised by User
Agents for contact information. The address element is likely to be
trapped in a spiral of non-use.
Personally, I'd go with microformats.
For a quick fix for the italics, just apply this in the CSS:
address {font-style: normal}
Kind regards,
-Alastair
--
Alastair Campbell | Director of User Experience
Nomensa Email Disclaimer:
http://www.nomensa.com/email-disclaimer.html
From: Penny Roberts
Date: Thu, Nov 30 2006 5:00AM
Subject: Re: address tag
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Alastair Campbell wrote:
<lots of interesting discussion of the address tag snipped>
> For a quick fix for the italics, just apply this in the CSS:
> address {font-style: normal}
Ah... would that I could... (do anything with the CSS that is: if I
need to restyle anything I have to do it inline.)
Penny
From: Gareth Dart
Date: Thu, Nov 30 2006 5:10AM
Subject: Re: address tag
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That's odd. Off topic but I'm curious - why can't you edit embedded or linked stylesheets? Is this a company policy type thing or a limitation of the CMS, and if so, well, I'd say that's a fairly serious limitation in a CMS.
G
>Ah... would that I could... (do anything with the CSS that is: if I
>need to restyle anything I have to do it inline.)
>
>Penny
From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Thu, Nov 30 2006 5:30AM
Subject: Re: address tag
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Gareth Dart wrote:
> I'd say that's a fairly serious limitation in a CMS.
Definitely. Separation of style and content are pretty fundamental,
several leagues up from whether to use the address element!
(Not that you shouldn't ask about it, just that it's a relatively small
issue in comparison.)
Kind regards,
-Alastair
--
Alastair Campbell | Director of User Experience
Nomensa Email Disclaimer:
http://www.nomensa.com/email-disclaimer.html
From: Penny Roberts
Date: Thu, Nov 30 2006 5:50AM
Subject: Re: address tag
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Gareth Dart wrote:
>>> Ah... would that I could... (do anything with the CSS that is:
>>> if I need to restyle anything I have to do it inline.)
> That's odd. Off topic but I'm curious - why can't you edit embedded
> or linked stylesheets? Is this a company policy type thing or a
> limitation of the CMS, and if so, well, I'd say that's a fairly
> serious limitation in a CMS.
Just the way the CMS has been set up so I suppose you could say company
policy.
Penny
From: Gareth Dart
Date: Thu, Nov 30 2006 6:00AM
Subject: Re: address tag
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Not to keep on about this, as it is off topic, but this policy has just effectively put you back almost a decade in terms of the amount of work you're going to have to do to design webpages. I can understand how a company would want to limit the amount of control a normal content author would have over presentation, but developers should be granted far greater discretion. This is especially important in terms of accessibility as if you identify an accessibility issue and the root cause needs to be addressed at a level above page content (ie, in embedded styles or code rendering done by the CMS) then your hands are effectively tied. In short - I feel your pain. ;-)
G
>Just the way the CMS has been set up so I suppose you could say company
>policy.
>
>Penny
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From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Thu, Nov 30 2006 7:40AM
Subject: Re: address tag
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> Not to keep on about this, as it is off topic, but this
> policy has just effectively put you back almost a decade in
> terms of the amount of work you're going to have to do to
> design webpages.
We're perhaps straying a bit OT here, but...
Seems that many CMSes these days are a decade behind in terms of
concepts like semantic markup, accessible markup, CSS-P, and true
separation of content and structure.
Even 'modern' CMSes products like Joomla still have presentation markup
stuck in the DB and intertwined into their own templating engines.
(I have a rather bad opinion of the CMS market space... ;o)
-Darrel
From: Gareth Dart
Date: Thu, Nov 30 2006 8:00AM
Subject: Re: address tag
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I'm working with Joomla, and found it to be the best of a middling bunch in terms of accessibility (I've had to do some tweaking here and there).
Oddly enough, when my predecessor in this job did an appraisal of all the CMSes out there, he found that there was precious little difference between commercial and open source products in terms of the accessibility of their output. According to his report, across the board on all features, in fact, commercial CMSes did not usually exceed their open source counterparts. Some commercial CMSes were not even platform independent in terms of browsers: they needed IE6 to work properly...
It's an immature area so far.
Gareth Dart
Web Developer
HESA
>We're perhaps straying a bit OT here, but...
>
>Seems that many CMSes these days are a decade behind in terms of
>concepts like semantic markup, accessible markup, CSS-P, and true
>separation of content and structure.
>
>Even 'modern' CMSes products like Joomla still have presentation markup
>stuck in the DB and intertwined into their own templating engines.
>
>(I have a rather bad opinion of the CMS market space... ;o)
>
>-Darrel
From: Penny Roberts
Date: Thu, Nov 30 2006 9:00AM
Subject: Re: address tag
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Austin, Darrel wrote:
>
> (I have a rather bad opinion of the CMS market space... ;o)
The biggest problem is that the reason for using a CMS is usually so
that *anyone* can add content without any specialised knowledge. It
doesn't matter how good the underlying CMS is, it all goes to pot when
someone who knows absolutely nothing about standards, semantics,
accessibility etc. is let loose on it.
So, for instance, in the one of the pages that I inherited there were
big chunks of text marked up a H3. They weren't headings but the person
who created the page knew nothing of headings; only that it produced big
bold text which was what she wanted.
Of course you can argue that it requires better training or a
limitation on who can use it: but that defeats the object of why the CMS
was chosen in the first place.
Penny
From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Thu, Nov 30 2006 2:20PM
Subject: Re: address tag
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On Thu, 30 Nov 2006, Alastair Campbell wrote:
> 1. Is there anything useful about address tags for accessibility in the
> specs? (No.)
In principle, since the address element is defined as containing contact
information for the document, it _could_ be useful - if browsers had some
simple support to it, like a command for accessing the address element if
there is one. But the specifications do not mention or encourage such
usage.
> 2. Do any current user agents do anything special with it? (Not that I
> know of.)
Apart from possibly rendering it in a special way, like italics, but
that'll probably reduce accessibility (by reducing readability) somewhat,
instead of improving it.
> 3. Is there any likely future use? (Unlikely.)
Agreed.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/