Re: Question on abbreviations (fwd)

At 12:59 PM 12/29/00 -0800, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>A question, would you also agree that words need to be defined by the 
>author?

That's the most encompassing quote I can use because it does get to the 
point nicely.

Yes and no. Mostly they are already defined somewhere and the means to get 
there is what's important. The authors' roles are certainly complex and 
require art/skill of a kind not regularly found anywhere. Of course on the 
RDF-interest group the link to the expansion of "RDF" may not matter much, 
or be used a lot by participants (although the "U" in URI is sometimes 
mistakenly quoted as "universal" instead of "uniform", even by "insiders"), 
but within said group it will often be helpful to know what SOAP stands for 
(I have no idea!) and I recall FOAF puzzling me somewhere recently.

Jason's version seems pretty nifty and some sort of "registry of 
abbreviations" wouldn't be useless.

I hope we're all feeling our way along in these things. That explanatory 
accompaniment be possible *without explicit action on the authors' parts* 
is one of the most exciting things about this Web of ours. Older forms of 
library/dictionary/encyclopedia research to learn about the W3C/WAI/GL/WG 
sorts of things leave much to be desired - and little outside time for 
feeding the goats.

The question of whether we are an appropriate locus of these things remains 
unresolved, but so long as there's a twig to hold the cloak that hides my 
"disability", I will try to have each of these features included. Some 
words are hard to find, like metaxis. But as that changes they will acquire 
currency.

So in summary: words need defining; who does it is still in the authors' 
hands; it affects PWDs disproportionately; it's within scope or nobody'd 
join the discussion.

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE

Received on Friday, 29 December 2000 16:31:01 UTC