[thelist] marking up an address

Phil Pickering phildpickering at googlemail.com
Tue Aug 8 04:45:17 CDT 2006


I've been thinking about (and researching) this a little further.

I guess that when the <address> element was first introduced it was
intended to markup the contact details for the author/original
document/further information, etc. At that time, it's quite possible
that the author /document/organisation wasn't online and therefore
might well have only had a physical address; hence the use of the
physical address in the earlier HTML spec's and the continued use of
that example on sites like W3Schools.

Over time, the need to use a physical address must have diminished as
the Web grew, and I guess that the W3C thought it was time to update
the example of the usage of the <address> element to try and stop
people assuming it was a "catch all" tag for all addresses.

I found this post by Patrick H. Lauke which I think sums it up very well:

"if the address/contact details that you're trying to mark up are,
say, the general contact details of the company whose site you're on,
then the ADDRESS element is perfectly valid.

what would not be valid would be to, for instance, put a whole contact
directory with your friends' addresses on your site, and mark each one
of those up as ADDRESS...as those addresses are not the contacts for
the current site."

(From this thread http://www.accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=29475)

I can quite understand why Tantek Celik described the <address>
element as "perhaps the most confusingly named HTML element" :)

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to learn more about it and
re-educate myself :)

Phil

On 07/08/06, Phil Pickering <phildpickering at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > However, I am sure it wasn't intended for physical addresses. As the
> > link to the spec you provided said "for a document or a major part of a
> > document such as a form", it's an address for the document author.
>
> Yeah, I agree it doesn't make it absolutely clear that the <address>
> element should/could be used for physical addresses... but earlier
> HTML spec's up to HTML 3.2 do:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32#address
>
> Not sure if that means that this particular usage is now deprecated...
> can't find anything to say it is.
>
> Thanks for the interesting discussion, and the Tantek link  :)
>
> Phil
>



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