Re: [330] Acronyms and abbreviations

On Thu, 21 Aug 2003, Joe Clark wrote:

>Time to go back to the drawing board.
>
>> Acronyms and abbreviations should be tied to a definition within the
>> document to a definition externally.
>
>Did anybody bother to read that sentence?

Yes. It doesn't make sense. I suspect that the author's intention was to have
an "or" after the word document.

>More generally, why are WAI and WCAG WG poised to force authors to link
>every acronym and abbreviation in every document forever to glossaries,
>which may not exist at all?

This suggestion (assuming I have correctly interpreted it) doesn't posit any
links to things which don't exist. As I read it, it requires a link to a
definition, which implies ensuring that the definition does, indeed, exist.

>What HTML mechanism will be suggested for this technique? href is not an
>attribute of the <abbr> and <acronym> elements.

To tie to a definition within a document one could use the HTML 4 technique
of using the title attribute. In other languages there may be more powerful
linking mechanisms. One could also use the approach of Annotea - with the
additional advantage of allowing a third party to make a repair to a page
that caused a problem, although the reliability of that repair potentially
suffers as a result.

As Gregg says below, there are different approaches for different languages -
HTML is still important to the Web, but there are a lot of XML languages (and
some pseudo-XML ones) around...

>(Don't bother talking about XHTML 2; it doesn't exist.)

Well, in the sense that WCAG 2 doesn't exist. If one assumes that at some
point WCAG 2 will exist, it seems reasonable, on the same grounds, to believe
XHTML 2 will as well - indeed there are drafts showing what it might look
like, browsers showing how it might work, andd people working busily to bring
that process to its conclusion so that it will exist.

>> The method for this would be in technology specific techniques.  We should
>> also define a semantic markup technique for ambiguous words and it could
>> be used for this as well.   That would help solve problems with whether a
>> word is a word or acronym or proper name etc.
>
>The proposal continues to assume the readers are unfamiliar with the
>subject-matter of the page and will be unaware of the abbreviations and
>acronyms used. In fact, many authors create pages for other people with
>similar expertise; they don't need abbreviations and acronyms spelled out
>for them, let alone linked to dictionaries that, I reiterate, may not
>actually exist.

Apparently some authors will not understand relatively simple propositions,
and use their misunderstanding to argue about hypothetical situations which
have in fact been ruled out. It seems plausible that misunderstandings could
also arise between authors, who make assumptions about their (unknown)
readers' familiarity with an arbitrary number of Tlas, and indeed (as people
have pointed out in relation to the overall use of language) other forms of
expression that can lead to confusion.

>The thrust of WAI and WCAG WG's approach is to make two tiny components of
>a subset of the pages on the Web-- abbreviations and acronyms on the pages
>that use them-- understandable to every single reader.

It seems to me, (as an interested observer) that in fact the thrust is to
explain how an author can ensure (should they so choose) that their pages as
a whole are understandable. One smalll facet of this is reducing the
confusion about locally understood terms which are not common to the entire
readership.

>Question 1: Why, exactly? Who said that everybody had to understand every
>page, disabled or not?

I don't think anyone did. I believe the group is working on explaining what
needs to be done to ensure that they can, if the author so desires.

>Question 2: Why pick on something small like abbreviations and acronyms?

There are some cognitive conditions such as semantic pragmatic disorder which
mean the people who happen to have them cannot effectively understand
anything but the most literal and concrete explanations - they have great
difficulty in generalising a principle from an example. A useful approach to
help such people is to pick out all the specific examples that a principle
implies. And in this case, abbreviations and acronyms are two specific
examples of the more general principle that Gregg was alluding to.

Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409 134 136
SWAD-E http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe         fax(france): +33 4 92 38 78 22
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Received on Sunday, 24 August 2003 21:31:20 UTC