Microformation

It’s been a busy week for microformats.

Google announced that it was following in the footsteps of Yahoo’s SearchMonkey in indexing microformats and RDFa to display in search results. For now, it’s a subset of microformats—hCard and hReview—on a subset of websites, including the newly microformated Yelp. The list of approved sites will increase over time so if you’re already publishing structured contact and review information, let Google know about it.

But the other new announcement is equally important. After a lot of hard work, the value class pattern is ready for use.

The what now? I hear you ask. Well, if you’ve been feeling hampered by the combination of the datetime and abbr design patterns, the value class pattern offers a few alternatives.

To my mind, that’s one of the greatest strengths of the value class pattern: it doesn’t offer one alternative, it allows authors to choose how they want to mark up their content. I think that’s one of the reasons why datetime values have proven to be such a sticking point up ‘till now. Concerns about semantics and accessibility really come down to the fact that, as an author, you had very little choice in how you could mark up a datetime value.

You could either present the datetime between the opening and closing tags of whatever element you were using:

<span class="dtstart">
 2009-06-05T20:00:00
</span>

…or you could put the value in the title attribute of the abbr element:

<abbr class="dtstart" title="2009-06-05T20:00:00">
 Friday, June 5th at 8pm
</abbr>

Those were your only options.

But now, with the value class pattern, all of the following are possible:

<span class="dtstart">
 <abbr class="value" title="2009-06-05">
  Friday, June 5th
 </abbr>
 at
 <abbr class="value" title="20:00">
  8pm
 </abbr>
</span>

<span class="dtstart">
 <span class="value-title" title="2009-06-05T20:00:00">
  Friday, June 5th at 8pm
 </span>
</span>

<span class="dtstart">
 <span class="value-title" title="2009-06-05">
  Friday, June 5th
 </span>
 at
 <span class="value-title" title="20:00">
  8pm
 </span>
</span>

<span class="dtstart">
 <span class="value-title" title="2009-06-05T20:00:00"> </span>
 Friday, June 5th at 8pm
</span>

Personally, I’ll probably use the first example. I like the idea of splitting up the date and time portions of a datetime value. I think there’s a big difference between putting a date string into the title attribute of an abbr element and putting a datetime string in there. In the past, when I argued that having an ISO date value in an abbreviation was semantic, accessible and internationalised, Mike Davies rightly accused me of using a strawman—the issue wasn’t about dates, it was about datetimes. That’s why I created the date design pattern page on the microformats wiki; to disambiguate it as a subset of the larger datetime design pattern.

Now, others might think that even using dates in combination with the abbr design pattern is semantically dodgy. That’s fine. They now have some other options they can use, thanks to the value-title subset of the value class pattern. Me? I don’t see myself using that. I’m especially not keen on the option to use an empty element. But I’m perfectly happy for other authors to go ahead and use that option. When it comes to writing, there are often no right or wrong answers, just personal preferences. That’s true whether it’s English, HTML, or any other language. As long as you use correct syntax and grammar, the details are up to you. You can choose semicolons or em-dashes when you’re writing English. You can choose abbr or value-title when you’re writing microformats.

The wiki page for the value class pattern doesn’t just list the options available to authors. It also explains them. That’s just as important. Head over there and read the document. I think you’ll agree that it’s an excellent example of clear, methodical writing.

The microformats wiki needs more pages like that. One of the biggest challenges facing microformats isn’t any particular technical problem; it’s trying to explain to willing HTML authors how to get up and running with microformats. Given Google’s recent announcement, there’ll probably be even more eager authors showing up, looking to sprinkle some extra semantics into their markup. We’ll be hanging out in the IRC channel, ready to answer any questions people might have, but I wish the wiki were laid out in a more self-explanatory way.

In the face of that challenge, the page for the value class pattern leads by example. Ben and Tantek have done a fantastic job. And it wouldn’t have been possible without the help and support of Bruce, James and Derek, those magnanimous giants of the accessibility community who offered help, support and data.