Re: Acronym in an acronym.

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

>On Sun, 9 Mar 2003, Tim Roberts wrote:
>
>  
>
>><acronym title="HTML Writers Guild">HWG</acronym>
>>
>>Then I realised that the acronym title attribute actually contains an
>>acronym in its self.
>>    
>>
>The ultimate problem is the design flaw in HTML that puts actual content
>into attributes. (We know that flaw from the alt attribute too: making the
>alternate content an attribute value restricts it to plain text - no
>lists, no tables, etc.)
>
>But we can avoid that problem when giving explanations of abbreviations
>simply by not using attributes. When you write explanations as normal
>content, they are accessible to everyone, and you are not limited to plain
>text.
>  
>

This technical problem is a reason why people are working on XHTML 2 and 
are preparing to make something that may not be backwards compatible 
with brosers designed for XHTML 1 (let alone browsers designed to cope 
with HTML 2 plus a few newer features...). Of course making a shift like 
this to XML is a big leap for people, and will take time, but then we 
are not yet living in a worl where HTML as a format for email is a 
really well-implemented thing. In part this is because it takes a long 
time for users to be generally aware of how to deal with things like tha 
massive security and privacy holes in most email clients.

Which reinforces Jukka's final point - there are ways of providing 
accessibility that do not rely on a particular technology, but a 
partticular technique. If they also work well with the technology, and 
with current and known future standards, they are well worth 
considering, since they might be the best possible solution for the 
largest possible impact.

cheers

Chaals

Received on Wednesday, 12 March 2003 07:50:22 UTC