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Microformats: Prefering machines over people

Anybody ever took a look at the Datetime Design Pattern at Microformats.org (via Georg Bauer (German))? It goes like this:

<abbr class="foo" title="YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+ZZ:ZZ">Date Time</abbr>

I think this is a misuse of the abbrevation tag - and worse: it's completly ignoring user experience. Most of nowadays browsers display the text of the title attribut when you hover over the abbrevation. Now imaging a user browsing your microformatted page. When he hovers over a date like - say - May 4th 1970, which is my birthday, he'll see a tooltip stating "1970-05-04T18:10:52+01:00". Doh!

Not to tell that screenreaders usually read the abbrevation's title. So, a screenreader would read "One Nine Seven Zero Minus Zero Five Minus Zero Four T One Eight Colon..." Really well done, you microformat people.

Like Colin Lieberman writes on A List Apart:

The point of including expanded forms of abbreviations is to make sure that users can access those forms if needed. The value of the abbr element lies in its ability to tell screen readers what they should read (thus improving the flow of spoken text), while also providing additional useful information to visual users with learning or cognitive disabilities (or those coping with language barriers). The assertion that abbr is structural is misguided, as the point of the tag is the content of its title attribute.

He's right. Abbrevation is not structural. Even it it once was intended to be, in real life it isn't. It seems, this has been forgotten by the microformat astronauts.

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Posted on January 17, 2006 in |

Comment by ryan king

January 18, 2006 - 23:58

So, assuming <abbr> is inappropriate for publishing human and machine values, how should it be done?

Oh, and I prefer the term 'microformats agua-nauts.'

Comment by Gerd Riesselmann

January 24, 2006 - 23:20

Sorry for answering that late, always beeing busy, busy, busy.

How should it be done? Don't know. To be honest I'm not really interested in publishing human and machine values - well at least aside from something like Dublin Core. Therefore I'm also not into microformats and the stuff alike.

However, two thoughts come to mind: First, there's a place you can put anything you like, and this place is called a comment. A comment generally is most approbiate for adding content that is not targeted to the primary audience, which in this case still are your site's readers.

Second, if this is not approbiate for some reason, make a coumputer read a human readable date. There may be some restrictions but in general it should work.

An example:

<abbr title="May 4th 1970"><span class="date date-ymd">1970/5/4</span></abbr>

In this example the abbrevation is used, so screenreaders actually spell the date nicely. The classes on the span tell the machine that theres a date in format Year-Month-Day coming. In Central Europe, the format of course will be Day-Month-Year. The computer should be smart enough to figure out that shlashes, spaces, dots, commas et al are dividers, shouldn't it?

This of course are just thoughs, I'm not pretending they are though out well. Maybe I'm even completly wrong. Anyhow, it's not my business after all :-).