I’m glad you got it sussed about the flexible mark-up. One of important things about microformats is that in most situations, you can use whatever mark-up you like. The class attribute maps elements to fields, but the type of element is irrelevant.

There are some optimisation patterns which work off the semantics of some specific elements, but in general, it’s entirely up to the author.

I think we should do a better job of clarifying that in examples. We use the most generic mark-up available (so as not to give the false impression that you have to use some other element), but don’t want to spread confusion in the other direction.

It’s on my list of things to improve on the wiki this year.