May
2008
abbr design and SEO
Just found an interesting snag with the abbr design pattern when viewing some recent search results where I’ve used abbr for dates.
It seems that if the title attribute of the abbr tag is indexed by search engines, the dates are printed twice in two formats, presumably expansion of abbreviations makes sense for search engines. Let me chew this one over.
[edit:the day after]
Having thought about this, it does seem to be a flaw with search engines, or at least the emphasis should be on search engines to better understand the abbr HTML tag, why? Because abbreviations are usually written in brackets!
A recent example I found of an hCalendar date showed that Google in this instance actually printed out both the contents of the title attribute and the value in the tag itself which lead to a mangled date display along the lines of “2008-04-13April 13th 2008″. Imagine a proper abbreviation would read “Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)”.
However should the search engine suppress either the title attribute or the value in the tag? In theroy the engine should work as a screen reader in suppressing “HTML” and reading out Hypertext Markup Language instead, not both.
Coming full circle this may not be an issue with the abbr-design pattern at all but with the work around using span tags, but it should be noted that some search engines may turn semantic code into a bit of a mess, equally a developer who works around abbr issues with span classes may also make a mess of it.
May
2008
While a screen-shot to illustrate the problem you mention would be helpful, there are far worse problems with the abbr pattern, which is very inaccessible in some forms; problems which have not been given due heed:
http://pigsonthewing.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/haccessibility-unhappy-first-birthday/
May
2008
Agreed Andy, this issue isn’t as serious as the other abbr issues, worth noting the findings though.
I’ve updated the post to throw some focus on search engines as they may be misunderstanding abbr anyway regardless of mF’s. Printing all the text in the abbr element? After all why shouldn’t engines do that that’s their job right? But it seems a fairly simple task to add some whitespace before the text which was in bewteen the abbr tags, and further why not add brackets to?
Thanks for the comment,
Lee