Re: [whatwg] Feeedback on <dfn>, <abbr>, and other elements related to cross-references

Smylers wrote:

> Well it's very close to being useless.  In that if browsers don't do
> anything with some mark-up, there's no point in having it (and indeed no
> incentive for authors to provide it).

Assistive technology is certainly a valid use case here.

> Yes, that is potentially ambiguous.  But it's the same in books,
> newspapers, and so on, where it turns out not to be much of a problem.

But books etc don't have any other way of providing 
disambiguation/structure. Under that reasoning, you could argue that 
there's no need for heading elements etc, as simply having text bigger 
works fine in print, so all we need is a font sizing markup option.

> What in practice would you expect AT to do with this knowledge?
> Remember that most abbreviations that aren't being tagged with
> expansions won't be marked up, so AT is going to have to deal sensibly
> with that case anyway.

So you'd prefer hit and miss heuristics over unambiguous interpretation?

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
______________________________________________________________
re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
[latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]
www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk
http://redux.deviantart.com
______________________________________________________________
Co-lead, Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
______________________________________________________________

Received on Monday, 21 April 2008 16:58:06 UTC