- From: Matthew Raymond <mattraymond@earthlink.net>
- Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2005 01:51:36 -0500
Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>Matthew Raymond wrote:
>>>In this situation "H two O" could potentially be pronounced
>>>"dihydrogen monoxide" or "water". Something like "green" has no
>>>such use, and <b> and <i> can at best be said to change the tone of
>>>pronunciation rather than what is actually said by the aural
>>>browser.
>
> An aural, speech or whatever browser should not do such a thing unless
> the author of document used ABBR, which is far more appropriate.
In another part of this thread, we were talking about how there
isn't necessarily a standard for how to pronounce chemical formulas. I
even suggested settings in aural browsers for the user's preferred
pronunciation. Therefore, using <abbr> is suboptimal, as it forces the
webmaster to choose a pronunciation while robbing the users of their own
preferences.
Furthermore, an abbreviation is not necessarily expanded into their
long form in aural browsers. For instance, when I write BU, I mean
Boston University, so I might use <abbr> for that, but if I were to read
it, I would say "B U" and not "Boston University".
Also, even if I were to do this:
| <abbr lang="en" title="water">H2O</abbr>
I might know that "H2O" is water, but do I know the molecular
structure of water? Is it a hydrogen atom with two oxygen ions, or two
hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom. There is no way to know (in theory,
since the molecular structure of water is common knowledge) unless you
know if the "2" is subscript or not.
Also note above that if you give a language, you are at the mercy of
translation software as to whether the chemical name will be properly
translated. So if your translator chokes on the name, you're screwed
because there's no subscript information to use even if your browser
chose to ignore the <abbr> tags and process their inside contents directly.
Received on Saturday, 8 January 2005 22:51:36 UTC