Table Bears, Microfairies, and Abbreviation Dust

Have you ever been lost in a markup forest surrounded by hungry, ferocious table bears? Your only hope for survival is to call on the help of the cute yet oh-so-powerful microfairies. But what's that? They can't help you? Their magical abbreviation dust won't work on the table bears? Oh no! What to do?!

Take a look at these tables, and see if you can spot which ones demonstrate good usage of semantic HTML and which don't.

Table A - Implicit dates

As used by sensible gnomes.

Table B - Explicit dates

As used by mad pandas.

Table C - Abbreviated explicit dates

As might be used by hCalendar microformats elves.

Question: Is Table B tip-top and dandy in the candy floss garden?

If the answer is no, then neither is Table C, which conveys the same information.

What? So that would mean that we can't use hCalendars in this situation!

Microfairies! Can this be true?!

Oh, why did those microfairies insist on bringing abbreviation dust?

But maybe it's not too late - if they zip on back to their pink sponge hovel to retrieve some of that fine generic dust, the forest could still be saved from the rampaging bears! Then they could even turn those rabid wolves into poodle puppies, and do so many other lovely gay happy skippy things!

• Vanquish bears: Times and dates are not always abbreviations. Sometimes 3pm is just 3pm.
• Abbreviation dust tolerant: In situations where tables are used, for example, the beauty of a matrix and row / column associations is that abbr elements are not only unnecessary, but incorrect.
• Bad dust: For the same reason non-visually impaired users don't want to read out "[time] Friday 27th April, 2007" on every row, neither do screen reader users want to hear it read out every time.
• Poodle puppies: When standard ISO time date stamps are used in abbreviation titles, screen readers don't handle the likes of "20070312T1700-06" very well.
• Furry poodle: Is "March 12, 2007 at 5 PM, Central Standard Time" an abbreviation of "20070312T1700-06"?
• Fluffy poodle: Er, what does abbreviate mean again?
• We love microfairies: Extra information can still be supplied!
• Happily ever after: If span (or any other element) were satisfactory in the the hCalendar microformat standard instead of the clearly problematic abbr, everyone's semantically happy, as are screen readers.