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Microformats rely often on the title attribute to provide machine-readable strings. This conflicts with tooltips, when they're not meant to be humanly readable. Unhelpful and uninteresting tooltips popping up interfere with user experiences. Uses of title for machine-parseable strings may be found at http://microformats.org. A new attribute should be added. I propose machine as the new attribute. Using title for machine-readable non-tooltip strings should be deprecated. While presently-stable microformats will likely retain title, this should encourage developers to be more semantic. And where the same string can be both a tooltip and machine-usable, using both attributes is preferred over title alone. Thank you. -- Nick
Microdata uses <meta itemprop=... content=...> for this purpose. Does that satisfy your use case?
Yes, on first impression I think it would work (cf. http://microformats.org/wiki/microdata); I should have caught the microdata addition to HTML5 earlier. Although I wonder if machine and microdata couldn't coexist. A machine="" attribute would be sufficiently semantic and easier for page authoring.
Microdata's entire purpose is to be machine-readable (while being primarily design to be easy to author). So I don't see what it would mean for the microdata and machine to not coexist. Anyway since <meta> satisfies your request, marked resolved. Please reopen with a clear description of what your request is, if there is something still to address.