Signing pages with <address> [was: www-watchdog]

Henrik Edlund wrote:
> 
> I have always wondered, and maybe you are the man to ask, why W3C puts
> other stuff than contact information inside the address element on their
> site.

I think <address> is something of a misnomer; the HTML 4
spec doesn't say much about style. But take a look
at the "Sign It!" page in the styleguide...
  http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/SignIt
Based on that, I take the <address> tag to provide
a signature for the page; signatures usually include
dates, ala

	signed this 8th day of May, 2001, __Daniel W. Connolly__.


> I have seen W3C for example put "Valid HTML 4!" inside the address
> element.

That seemed right to me on various occasions, but now
I can't think of a good explanation as to why.

But some things that do seem to fit are things like

	-- the title of the signer; i.e. the role which
	the signer is playing

	-- other forms of endorsement; e.g. if the Florp
	group approved the document today, I'd include
	"approved 7 May 2001 by the Florp group" in
	the <address>.

> If I look at the use
> of the address element it seems to be more of a way to make text italic
> (in Netscape at least) than to mark up _contact_ information.

Please don't look at it that way. Think of it as a way
to say "on this date, I make myself accountable for this
information; here's some contact information that you
can use to hold me accountable."

It's a lot like a .sig in email.

> 
> With regards,
> 
>   Henrik
> 
> On Mon, 7 May 2001, Dan Connolly wrote:
> 
> > Also, http://www.w3.org/P3P/ isn't signed.
> > Please add <address>...</address> markup
> > per http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/SignIt .
> > While you're at it, I suggest a link to site-comments ala..
> >
> >   Dan Connolly
> >   Created April 1997; policy/maintenance info
> >   feedback to connolly+xml and site-comments (public archive)
> >   $Revision: 1.188 $ $Date: 2001/05/01 01:18:25 $ by $Author: connolly $
> >       -- http://www.w3.org/XML/

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Tuesday, 8 May 2001 00:10:49 UTC