Re: extending CSS is unnecessary Re: Abbreviations and Acronyms: [techs] Latest HTML Techniques Draft

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Christoph Päper wrote:

>*Charles McCathieNevile*:
>>
>> <ruby class="acron">
>> <rb>NATO</rb><rt>North Atlantic Treaty Organisation</rt></ruby>'s
>
>That's not really better than
>
>  <acronym title="North Atlantic Treaty Organisation">NATO</acronym>'s.

It is certainly not worse, and it is part of XHTML 1.1 and current drafts of
XHTML 2, screen presentation can be done with widely implemented CSS1, and
audio presentation can be done with not-so-widely implemented CSS2, in a way
that provides relatively simple flexibility for users.

>A UA should know to do the right thing when encountering
>
>  <acronym>NATO</abbr>'s
>
>or
>
>  <abbr>NATO</abbr>'s.

Yep. But they don't...

>Because a UA can never know all initialisms, acronyms and other abbreviations
>of every language,

exactly.

>a author should be able to help it out---outside the
>mark-up. It's quite similar to automatic hyphenation.

Exactly. The main point of my mail was to suggest that we could specify what
is required in existing CSS, which seems like a big win.

I could have said

  ...<acronym class="accron">NATO</acronym>'s strategy for the <acronym
  class="init">UN</acronym>...

but it means I need to speak the content of the attribute for acronyms, and
that starts to reduce the flexibility and increase the number of things I
rely on. (There is a premise that raw XML is not a hard thing to deal with if
you style it...) This is a small point though.

Using ruby instead of a specific acronym or abbreviation element with a title
attribute makes it more flexible, and easier to specify particular
presentation. As noted elsewhere, different people have different ideas about
how to pronounce the same acronym, or whether something really is an acronym,
so I thought it would be more useful to have the pieces up front.

Cheers

Chaals

Received on Friday, 12 December 2003 09:16:54 UTC