- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2003 21:31:10 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Joe Clark <joeclark@joeclark.org>
- Cc: WAI-GL <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
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 Post: 21 Mitchell street, FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia or W3C, 2004 Route des Lucioles, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Sunday, 24 August 2003 21:31:20 UTC