[microformats-discuss] RFC: Thoughts on Video and Audio Microformats

Tue Oct 18 23:54:19 PDT 2005

On Oct 18, 2005, at 12:50 PM, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:
> Hello,
>> On 10/18/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar <drernie at opendarwin.org> wrote:
>> [...]
>>>>> The "class" attribute and the "title" attribute imply absolutely no
>>> semantics (as far as I know).
>>>> Um, not quite. Let me try to explain, though Tantek or Ryan could
>> probably do better. First of all, you *are* correct in that the
>> preferred method is to reuse *existing* HTML semantics; the URN trick
>> is rather clever, I must admit.
>>>> However, there's a deeper design principle at stake: human-
>> readability. The one concern I have with URNs -- even more than the
>> fact that they are deprecated -- is that they are pretty much opaque,
>> and somewhat confusing.
>> I like to get some clarification here. When you say "The one concern
> I have with URNs... is that they are pretty much opaque". Who are you
> talking about? Opaque to who?
>> There are (at least) 2 parties involved. The person scripting the
> HTML code. And the person viewing the HTML code (through their
> browser). (You could also consider web crawlers and other "machines"
> to be parties too. But I won't get into that here.)
>> To the person scripting the HTML code, the "urn" attribute is no more
> opaque than the "rev" or "rel" attribute. If we consider that using
> "rel" and "rev" is good practice (for Microformats) then I can't see
> why "urn" wouldn't be acceptable also. (Well, if it was still part of
> the latest HTML spec, that is.)

Which it isn't. Still.
-ryan
> ...
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com