Re: Deprecate <acronym>

OK, with respect to all involved, this thread is slowly starting to  
lose touch with reality. I believe that the original reason for  
deprecating/removing <acronym> was that the difference between  
<acronym> and <abbr> is at best not very clear, and at worst  
confusing. Adding <initialism> or <abbr type="..."> isn't going to  
solve this. Much of the semantic abuse of HTML nowadays is the fact  
that the semantics according to the spec are often confusing. Adding  
superfluous granularity is not going to help. Besides, as was said at  
the start of this thread by Colin:

> I've learned in the past week that the reason screen readers don't  
> expand marked-up abbreviations by default is that they (screen  
> readers) don't trust HTML authors to understand the need of users  
> of screen readers. (This is the same reason they don't support  
> aural css).
>
> These elements are really only useful to super-conscientious  
> authors who are trying to be helpful to their readers. There is  
> absolutely no need whatever to distinguish between acronyms and  
> abbreviations for these uses.

We need to have the right amount of granularity that is going to be  
accepted (i.e. actually used) by the widest audience. Otherwise,  
there's no point.

At the very least, adding a type attribute or using class with <abbr>  
means that joe html doesn't have to deal with the choice if he  
doesn't want to.

I myself like the idea of using class, as it then doesn't have to be  
part of the spec. instead there could be a reccomendation to content  
authors wishing to further divide <abbr> to use class and aural css  
markup (Was this original intent of suggesting using the class  
attribute with <abbr>?) This also has the benefit of being completely  
compatible with the existing spec, for what it's worth.

Matt Freels

Il giorno 25/mar/07, alle ore 21:56, Eric Daspet ha scritto:

>
> Le Dim 25 mars 2007 20:51, Noah Slater a écrit :
>>> <abbr class="initialism">W3C</abbr>
>>> <abbr class="acronym">RADAR</abbr>
>
>> +1 for this methodology. This is exactly what I intended.
>>
>> How about adding a "type" attribute to the "abbr" element to replace
>> your overloading of the "class" attribute?
>
> Please don't.
>
> What is the purpose in deprecating and/or removing the duality in
> <acronym> / <abbr> if we replace it with a type attribute ? All  
> that we
> will achieve will be broken compatibility : no simplification and  
> no new
> meaning.
>
>
> What was the use case in removing <acronym> ?
>
> - If was is for simplification, then it seems to me that two simple  
> tags
> are simplier than a tag with two values in an attribute. This is
> especially true if the two tags exists since many years
>
> - If was is because people used to ignore one of the two tags, please
> consider that they will not do more effort in writing a new  
> attribute and
> this addition will be useless
>
> <acronym> is not broken, either leave it or remove it but write in  
> a new
> way is definitely not needed IMHO.
>
> -- 
> Éric Daspet
>
>
>

Received on Monday, 26 March 2007 15:37:13 UTC