- From: Christoph Päper <christoph.paeper@crissov.de>
- Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2006 20:17:20 +0100
First off I think the requirement for a |title| is too strict, because there are time and space saving abbreviations everyone knows -- i.e. either their expansion or their meaning -- that do not need an expansion, e.g. "e.g." or "AIDS". Therefore the second sentence should use 'may', not 'should'. Maybe there could be a mechanism using |link| to external abbreviation glossaries, which may use |dl| instead of |dfn|. (I have kind of a deja-vu here, like I already proposed that sometime somewhere.) I actually do like |acronym| and use it for "words" where a number or uppercase letter appears non-initially (except Scottish names), which get a reduced font size and/or small caps whereas true abbreviations (with periods) just have their inter-word spacing reduced. Everything else <abbr title="does not">doesn't</abbr> need markup. I digress, the main reason for this e-mail is the question for the recommended usage of |abbr| (in an English text): 1. <abbr>i. e.</abbr> <abbr>i.e.</abbr> <abbr>ie.</abbr> <abbr>ie</abbr> (That's out of the scope of the specification of course.) 2. <abbr>i. e.</abbr> <abbr title="id est">i. e.</abbr> <abbr title="that is">i. e.</abbr> 3. <abbr ... lang="la">i. e.</abbr> <abbr ... lang="en">i. e.</abbr> AFAIK |lang| (and |xml:lang| as well) applies to the textual element content _and_ its attributes' contents, where this is not of a language-neutral type. If you cannot answer 2. and 3. the definition of |abbr| is broken, but I expect either of these: <abbr title="id est" lang="la">i. e.</abbr> <abbr title="that is" lang="en">i. e.</abbr> (or inherited language) This is a more expressive solution, but also harder to implement: <link rel="abbr glossary" href="abbr.html"> ... <abbr>i. e.</abbr> abbr.html: <dl> <di><dt lang="la">i. e.</dt> <dd lang="la">id est</dd><dd lang="en">that is</dd></di>
Received on Wednesday, 1 November 2006 11:17:20 UTC