BBC Rejects hCalendar Microformat Because Of Accessibility Concerns

The BBC have announced that they’ll be removing hCalendar microformats from their online programme listings, because of the accessibility issues with the ABBR design pattern.

Oh how I’ve longed for such news. I love the idea of microformats, although in the long run code is machine-made and machine-readable, so RDFa will be a hit later, I’m sure.

But I love the idea that those of us who work on smaller projects can include a dose of semanticism into our HTML without all the fuss of alternate resources etc., which is admittedly difficult for many of us mere mortals.

Yet I belong to those who think the use of abbr is A Bad Idea, as I said back in 2007 on the WaSP’s hAccessibility article.

Here’s to hoping the BBC will shake a few resolutions in the microformats community.

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