I certainly don’t think that a lot of sites would use those classes, but there are probably some (I would imagine) that do. If the site is well-designed, then it shouldn’t be too hard to change the classes so they don’t clash. If it is reasonably possible to avoid having to do that, I think it would be preferrable to have these attributes in a separate namespace.

You’re absolutely right about “rel=”, it wouldn’t be a good match for what you’re going for. As for “data-”, it is a proposed set of attributes for HTML5, with the idea being that you could use a ‘data-twitter=”foo”‘ attribute in your markup and the browser would ignore it for anything presentational (but could use DOM methods to get its value). I don’t know what the current status is for data attributes, but I think that most browsers will behave as expected (ignore it for layout, but make the value avalilable through the DOM).

That said, I think the HTML class-based way of doing it is probably the best we can do now, even if it’s not the technical ideal.

Do you have any evidence that “a lot” of sites currently use class=“twitter-status” ?

There is no data- attribute in valid HTML 4.01 as currently used on many sites.

The rel atttribute describes the relatonship between documents. Can you explain how you think that would apply, in these cases?

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001314.html

I can’t help but think that using something other than a class attribute would be a better idea. It is plausible that someone would have a “twitter-status” class in their existing page, so giving special meaning to that class could break a lot of sites.

The “rel” or even “data-” attributes would seem to be better choices for this kind of markup. Otherwise, I like the proposal.

I was also thinking about making a class for status updates because of a Jetpack I am going to make. I’m not sure if there are any other use cases though, I think that other twitter clients probably have a status update page too, so the links to say twitter.com?status=Example%20Page%20http://tr.im/... can be changed to use another twitter client.

How does twitter-update sound to you?

E

Here are some test cases: http://pigsonthewing.org.uk/twitter-microformat

Great idea! I wrote a Jetpack to do what you have described: http://jetpackgallery.mozillalabs.com/jetpacks/169 it adds a menu item to Firefox’s ‘Tools’ menu where you can easily enable/disable it.

Enjoy, I know I will.
Erik