Re: p in address tag?

On 11/8/05, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Asbjørn Ulsberg wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 07 Nov 2005 15:51:39 +0100, David Dorward <david@us-lot.org> wrote:
> >
> >> <address>
> >>  Page Author's Name <br>
> >>  Page Author's Street Address <br>
> >>  Page Author's Town <br>
> >>  Page Author's Post Code
> >> </address>
> >
> > I'm sorry to say it, but this sucks, structurally at least.
>
> As well as practically. Adequate markup for lines (which are structural
> parts here, but also visually important) would allow a rendering where
> a line is continued with indentation if it does not fit into the available
> horizontal space. It would also allow some noticeable (though short)
> pauses in reading the text aloud, as well as referring to the lines
> as elements e.g. in client-side scripting.
>
> > Even <address>'s meaning baffles me.
>
> It was never a good idea, and the use of <address> by the specs is so rare
> that we can't expect search engines, browsers, and other software start
> making use of them by the specs. Besides, it's very poorly named.
> It should have been <author> or something like that.
>
> > And shouldn't the contents of <address> be specified a bit more
> > detailed?
>
> No, the whole element is bad design. We could use <author>, which simply
> specifies that its content is information about the author of the document
> (it could be just anything, even a short biography). We could use <email>
> and <postal>, though for the former, a link with mailto: URL might
> suffice. A postal address should certainly have an obligatory line
> structure, and probably nothing more. The world of postal addresses is
> far too confused, with every little corner of the world making its own
> standards for international postal addresses. But knowing just that some
> lines constitute a postal address could be useful. (If it happens inside
> <author>, it should probably specify a postal address of the author.)

This all goes back to the HTML's original intentions of marking up the
basic building blocks of a document through the standard communication
methods of the day.

However it seems very much that we're confused at this point since we
seem to be advocating getting rid of some of these basic building
blocks (like address) and not getting rid of the other building blocks
(like p). P is in the same exact category of semantics that Hn,
ADDRESS and UL are. P really means argument, idea, group of thoughts,
etc. It has different meanings. Here someone was advocating its usage
for addresses.

But ADDRESS itself means more than author. It could be a destination
on an envelope or the source address on a letter. Look at documents
from 10 years ago and you'll see a very close correlation between the
structures used in them and the elements of early HTML.

--

Orion Adrian

Received on Tuesday, 8 November 2005 13:41:45 UTC