Re: Question on abbreviations (fwd)

At 07:47 PM 2000-12-25 -0500, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>Hmmm. I think we need to give a good answer to this one. It will probably
>come back. (My ideal is to expand always, until user agents are smart enough
>to look it up themselves...)
>

AG::

Yes, that seems like option #1.

But we need to hear (why) from the people who felt that expanding in all cases
was onerous.  Seems like doing a search and replace to proliferate the
expansion would not be that bad.

Certainly, the guideline here expects intelligence from the UA that the format
specifications generally do not provide.  The format-defined semantic model of
HTML and XML does not particularly support the recognition of "another use of
the same [element content] as was given an expansion above."

A counter-example to that general statement is the define/use cycle in SVG  
Here you can embed the expansion in the definition and use the symbol
repeatedly with terse 'use' references.

A dictionary would be a third-party way to supply the expansions.  This is
likely to refer to the terms it defines not by location or node ID but by
spelling.  This is why we need XML Schema and _pattern matching which is not
predicated on reference by URI_ in order to build the infrastructure we need. 
But regular expressions and pattern matching are predicated on the character
model at least, if not the infoset.

This question has coordination written all over it.

The issue about how burdensome it is to expand all instances means GL has a
stake.

The issue about can the UA process the expansions (if only given once)
involves
a UA/PF dependency, so both those groups have a stake, here.

ER is the lead group as far as experimenting with the application of patterns
and rules.  So we don't want to fail to check with them.

>cheers
>
>Charles
>
>-- 
>Charles McCathieNevile    <mailto:charles@w3.org>mailto:charles@w3.org   
phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
>W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                     
<http://www.w3.org/WAI>http://www.w3.org/WAI
>Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
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France
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 15:54:48 -0500
>From: Bill Kules <wmk@takoma-software.com>
>To: WAI Mailing List <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
>Subject: Question on abbreviations
>Resent-Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 15:56:17 -0500 (EST)
>Resent-From: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
>
>Re: checkpoint 4.2, "Specify the expansion of each
>abbreviation or acronym in a document where it first
>occurs."
>
>Since many HTML documents are not designed to be
>read linearly, what is the definition of the first
>occurence in that case?  Is there consensus on
>this?  (Based on postings I've seen, it seems unlikely.)
>
>Bill
>-- 
>Bill Kules, President            Takoma Software, Inc.
>(301) 891-7271 voice             Takoma Park, MD
>(301) 891-7273 fax              
<http://www.takoma-software.com/>http://www.takoma-software.com
>(240) 460-7376 cellphone/pager   wmk@takoma-software.com
>

Received on Wednesday, 27 December 2000 22:18:25 UTC