Abbr and acronym in WCAG 2

Details are often revealing.

In WCAG-1 abbr and acronym were priority 3,
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#gl-abbreviated-and-foreign, and this
impossible guideline could safely be disregarded by most web content
authors.

In the proposal for WCAG-2 abbr and acronym are suddenly promoted to
being "Level 1 Success Criteria for Guideline 3.1",
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-WCAG20-20040730/#meaning.

*** Does this mean that every web content author now has to markup
abbreviations and acronyms just to get near the "Level 1 Success
Criteria"? This is not going to win WCAG many new friends.

In spring I published an article called, "ABBR and ACRONYM are for user
agents not for end users ", www.smackthemouse.com/20040108.
 
The problem is that I, the supposed "expert", no matter how mediocre,
don't understand the "Level 1 Success Criteria for Guideline 3.1", the
wording:

"The meaning of abbreviations and acronyms can be programmatically
located."
 
More details of the old impossible WCAG-1 sort can be found in "HTML
Techniques for WCAG 2.0", 5.1 and 5.2. Some progress made in the old
draft for WCAG 2.0,
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-WCAG20-20030624/#acronym-abbr-def, seems to
have been abandoned?

The new proposal for WCAG-2 has a problem if it is too difficult to
understand.
 
Best regards,

Jesper Tverskov
www.smackthemouse.com

Received on Wednesday, 25 August 2004 10:53:43 UTC