From that, and from what I’ve read elsewhere, I’d agree with you that the address element is optional. Unlike for instance labeling the input element, the address element is a plus, rather than a necessity.

Thanks for your comments and reminding us about the accessibility side of this.

anyway, after looking into it, I think that the requirement of the address element is a “interpretation” that the Toronto University have of the WCAG guidelines, since the guidelines are there to simply “guide” you…

Mark up documents with the proper structural elements.

if you interpret that quote form the WCAG guidelines, marking up a site’s author’s email address with the tag would be qualitively satisfying this guideline, and not providing it would be unsatisfactory… in my opinion :)

hope that helps a little?

but if you follow this hyperlink and then just to the right of the “login” button, there is a “change guideline” link, click it and select WCAG1.0 AAA… and then… (lol) click on the general errors and you can see that the website fails because it has no address element.

I use the word “fail” but Accessibility is qualitive not quantitive I believe… anyhow, It’s a good element to have in your page, and requires very little coding… so why not have it?

Level AAA requires the address element? I’m finding it hard to find info about that… Can you point me to a site where this is documented perhaps?

although searching google it’s pretty damn hard to find any documentation about it, and the only reason I know is because I thought it’d be cute to test my site on: http://checker.atrc.utoronto.ca/ which let’s you evaluate against all sorts of accessibility guidelines :)

by the way, hi ;)