Re: Promotion of XHTML

On 12/31/02 6:10 PM, "Sander Tekelenburg" <tekelenb@euronet.nl> wrote:

> 
> At 00:31 -0800 UTC, on 12/31/02, Tantek Çelik wrote:
> 
>> On 12/30/02 10:55 PM, "Devon Y." <vehementpetal@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
>>> Small point... IE doesn't support HTMLs' <abbr>, which means it wouldn't
>>> support XHTMLs' <abbr> either.
>> 
>> IE5+/Mac supports <abbr>.
> 
> Depends on how you define "support". IE 5.x for Mac OS

Actually, since IE5.0/MacOS7.x nearly three years ago.

> kind of supports
> <ABBR>, in that it recognizes it and provides the user with the contents of
> its TITLE attribute (through a tooltip) when the user mouses over it. But its
> default Style Sheet does not offer the user any clue that there is a TITLE
> attribute to be found.

There is no normative (nor even informative) default style sheet rule for
ABBR in the HTML4.01 spec.  The CSS2 spec Appendix A suggests
font-variant:small-caps for ABBR which looks quite wrong in many typical
uses of ABBR so thus we didn't small-caps ABBR (however we did for ACRONYM
which results in an "Economist" like styling of ACRONYMs).

> It requieres an author or user Style Sheet to provide
> that clue.

Which is perfectly fine, as the spec only asks to "allow authors" to provide
that clue, rather than any sort of UA default requirement.
 
> I suppose that in the strictest sense, you could therefore say Mac IE 5.x
> supports <ABBR>.

Precisely.

> However, when you consider this sentence from the HTML 4.01
> specs "The ABBR and ACRONYM elements allow authors to *clearly indicate*
> occurrences of abbreviations and acronyms.", [emphasis mine] then maybe it
> becomes a bit of a stretch to say that Mac IE 5.x supports <ABBR>.

Not at all.   From your quote:

"The ABBR and ACRONYM elements _allow authors_[1] to _*clearly indicate*_[2]
occurrences of abbreviations and acronyms."

[1] allow authors
 IE5/Mac fully parses and represents the ABBR elements in its internal tree
structure, exposing ABBR elements to _allow authors_ to do as they please
with CSS1 (and some CSS2) style sheet rules for ABBR, and/or DOM access to
ABBR elements.

[2] *clearly indicate*
 IE5/Mac has solid support for CSS1 (and some CSS2) which certainly allows
the author to _clearly indicate_ occurrences using any number of stylistic
effects, e.g.
 
> I like how Mozilla followed iCab's example by dotted-underlining <ABBR>, and
> improved upon it by allowing alteration of that presentation through CSS.

abbr { border-bottom:1px dotted }

 or

abbr { border:solid 1px gray }

 or

abbr { background:#EEF }

 etc. 

work just fine in an author or user style sheet.

Regards,

Tantek

Received on Tuesday, 7 January 2003 07:00:47 UTC