Re: abbr/acronym - repetitive use

At 1:59 PM -0800 2001/11/21, William R Williams/R5/USDAFS wrote:
>Now, I will not argue the point too enthusiastically, and mean no offense,
>but here's my take...
>To engage in specific behaviors which favor one population group over
>another is discrimination.
>[...]
>In the situation to which I was referring, the repeated use of
>acronym/abbreviation tags provides information to people using AT which is
>not equally available to people who do not use AT -- it's an inequity
>present only because HTML allows this to happen (and the developer
>implements it).

The problem here is that you assume that <abbr> and <acronym> are
intended only to favor one particular audience -- people with
disabilities -- and that's simple not true.

As an example, modern versions of IE -- which account for at least
75% of the general audience, according to recent figures -- will
gladly display a tooltip when you mouse over the following:

     <abbr title="World Wide Web Consortium">W3C</abbr>

On browsers which support (mostly) CSS2, you can write a user
style sheet which automatically expands abbreviations if you like;
this is probably doable in Mozilla and maybe Netscape 6.

So this isn't an inequity -- and in fact, markup of all abbreviations
(not just on first appearance) is probably the best way to use the
<abbr> element.  It's a much more sensible thing to do, really.

--Kynn

-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Thursday, 22 November 2001 11:45:59 UTC