[uf-discuss] Re: Show Microformat Brainstorming

Tue Dec 6 10:22:05 PST 2005

Hello,
On 12/6/05, Charles Iliya Krempeaux <supercanadian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,

[...]
> So, the orthogonal concepts here seem like:
> * there's the concept of a "preview" image. (maybe thumbnail would
> be a better name.)
> * there's the concept of a "show"
> * there's the concept of a "teaser"
> * If it is a teaser there is a "Pay to View" link
> * show can divided up into multiple contiguous files
> * teaser can be made up of multiple files
> * alternatives of the same media

There's some stuff related to this on the wiki:
 http://microformats.org/wiki/alternates-examples
 http://microformats.org/wiki/alternates-brainstorming
To me,, I get the impression that the favorite for speciying a set of
alternate links to the "same" thing is something like:
 <ul class="alternates">
 <li><a href="clip.mpeg">MPEG</a></li>
 <li><a href="clip.ogm">OGG</a></li>
 <li><a href="clip.avi">AVI</a></li>
 </ul>
Now, from the point of view of reusing existing HTML elements that
already have the proper semantics, I agree that at first that this
does seem like a good idea. However, it seems to have some problems:
#1: You can't have loosely coupled alternatives.
#2: Without some pretty fancy CSS styling, this is really going to
mess up people's webpages. (This will probably be a "show stopper"
for some people.)
For those 2 reasons, I'm more inclined to go with something like:
 <span class="alternates">
 <a class="alternate" href="clip.mpeg">MPEG</a>
 <a class="alternate" href="clip.ogm">OGG</a>
 <a class="alternate" href="clip.avi">AVI</a>
 </span>
That way you could do stuff like:
 <p>
 To help software handle RSS properly you should use RSS
Disposition Hinting (<span class="alternates"><a
href="http://advogato.org/article/852.html" title="RSS Disposition
Hinting Proposal">Advogato version</a>, <a
href="http://changelog.ca/log/2005/08/21/rss-disposition-hinting-proposal"
title="RSS Disposition Hinting Proposal">ChangeLog.ca 
version</a></span>).
 </p>
If you wanted to be lazy, you could even do the following:
 <p class="alternates">
 To help software handle RSS properly you should use RSS
Disposition Hinting (<a href="http://advogato.org/article/852.html"
title="RSS Disposition Hinting Proposal">Advogato version</a>, <a
href="http://changelog.ca/log/2005/08/21/rss-disposition-hinting-proposal"
title="RSS Disposition Hinting Proposal">ChangeLog.ca version</a>).
 </p>
(Don't know what people think of the class names I'm using. They may
or may not be too generic.)
> * you can combine all these
>> Did I miss anything?

[...]
See ya
--
 Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.
 charles @ reptile.ca
 supercanadian @ gmail.com
 developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/
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