[whatwg] Should <address> be more general-purpose?

[Colin Lieberman]

Hi; This is my first post to the list.

Andy - one of my first thoughts when reading through the HTML5 spec was 
that one of the benefits of dramatically improving available markup 
would be getting rid of the need for microformats-type approaches.

With all possible respect to microformats, I see them as a hack -- a 
hack that grew out of the deficiencies of HTML. A good, general purpose 
<address> element could meet all the needs met by the adr microformat, 
with the benefits of being standardized, and the possibility of 
user-agents handling the markup natively.

Perhaps what's needed is a type attribute ("postal", "email", etc) as 
well as a rel attribute ("author", "contact", "example", etc.). Maybe it 
would be useful to have a "for" attribute:
<address type="postal" rel="contact" for="cal_08_07">...</address> would 
signify a postal contact address for the content of the element with id 
cal_08_07.

I think it's useful to look at microformats as examples of very real 
needs that HTML doesn't meet, and work to incorporate those solutions in 
HTML.

Regards,
Colin Lieberman

Andy Mabbett wrote:
> In message <op.toc4lon97a8kvn at hp-a0a83fcd39d2>, Simon Pieters
> <zcorpan at gmail.com> writes
>
>   
>> should <address> be more general-purpose?
>>     
>
> what benefit would that have, over the "adr" microformat?
>
>         <http://microformats.org/wiki/adr>
>
> The latter has better granularity, allowing for street-address,
> locality, region, country and postcode, for example, to be marked up
> separately.
>
>