David Woolley wrote:
>> That's the use that the element was designed for which can also be
>> written: 
>> 
>> Orion Adrian 123 Barrier St. Lizardlick, NC 21001 United States
> 
> It would be written like:
> 
>   Orion Adrian, 123 Barrier St., Lizardlick, United States, NC 21001
> 
> and that is typically exactly how it would be presented in academic
> papers, except that it would be in italics.  Things like address and
> cite are semantic markup for things that would be typically set in
> italics in a printed, English language, academic paper.   


This has been an interesting thread so far.

ADDRESS has been underused for quite some time, which is a shame really,
because it does have a semantic meaning, vague as it is.

However, with XHTML2 I am super-excited with the idea of @role (I think
it is/was a flash of brilliance), and I believe, by the spec
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-role.html#s_rolemodule ), @role could
and would solve the very problems discussed so far.

No where in the spec does it say that there can only be *one* instance
of ADDRESS in any document, so all we really need to do is "define" what
we as authors mean when we use the ADDRESS element.  Consider:

	<address role="author">John Foliot</address>
	<address role="company">WATS.ca</address>
	<address role="city_state">Ottawa, ON</address> 
	<!-- this one is weak, but I'm working off the top of my head
-->
	<address role="country">Canada</address>
	<address role="email">foliot@wats.ca</address>
	<address role="website">http://www.wats.ca</address >

...etc. etc.  Due to @role's extensible nature (via RDF), this now gives
the *idea* of Address[1] some definition, there could be a core list
(which I believe is already being developed:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-role.html#col_Role ) or a *unique*
definition as required.  Since, by default ADDRESS is a block level
element, without author intervention it displays on individual lines
(addressing the visualization issue), but may also be styled differently
via CSS/DOM

Here and now considerations:  OK, so XHTML2 is still a draft, however
this does not preclude using ADDRESS as described above, minus the real
semantic definitions afford by @role.  However the tricky ID attribute
or the less useful TITLE attribute could both stand-in in a pinch today,
validating to HTML 4 and beyond.

Thoughts?

JF
--
John Foliot  foliot@wats.ca
Web Accessibility Specialist / Co-founder of WATS.ca
Web Accessibility Testing and Services
http://www.wats.ca    
Phone: 1-613-482-7053  


Address (n.)

         1. A description of the location of a person or organization,
as written or printed on mail as directions for delivery: wrote down the
address on the envelope.
         2. The location at which a particular organization or person
may be found or reached: went to her address but no one was home. 

Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=Address