Re: acronyms and character entity set codes

If it isn't against the spirit or letter of the specifications then it is
probably allowed. Based on that assumption, I would say that it is kosher to
mark up a single character as an ABBR or ACRONYM. In the same way that it is
kosher to mark up a greek letter gamma.

For most cases it is perhaps redundant, but thre are probably times when it
is helpful. And my opinion (speaking from the bazaar, or is that the bizarre
*grin*, rather than the cathedral) is that it is syntactically legal and
sound to do so.

Charles McCN

On Wed, 18 Aug 1999, Gregory J. Rosmaita wrote:

  aloha, y'all!
  
  a recent exchange on the AU WG list -- which begins at: (long URL warning!)
  <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-au/1999JulSep/0100.html>
  reminded me, that, a few months ago, whilst working under a tight deadline, i
  found myself searching the W3C's MarkUp web space...  in the course of
  listening to the MarkUp activity's main page, i heard the announcement for what
  was then the brand new reformulation of strict HTML4 into XML -- XHTML (TM),
  but since the trademark symbol was superscripted, part of a hyperlink, and
  there was no white space between the TM and the XHTML, what i  heard was that
  the W3C was promulgating something named X H T M L T M -- which confused the
  hell out of me, for whilst i instantly identified meaning of the X the H the T
  the initial M and the L, i could not, for the life of me, figure out what in
  the world the extra T and M stood for, until i took a listen to the document
  source and discovered that what i took for part of the ML's acronym was
  actually a trademark symbol (as defined by the character entity &#8482;)... 
  needless to say, i wasted a good deal of time trying to figure out something
  which could have easily been made self-evident, had the trademark been
  encapsulated in an ACRONYM with the TITLE "trademark"
  
  which brings me to wonder--can one use ABBR and ACRONYM on character entity set
  codes?  i don't "see" why not -- after all, a character entity code is just a
  bit of text -- but can't find anything that says whether or not it's kosher...
  
  gregory
  --------------------------------------------------------
  He that lives on Hope, dies farting
       -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1763
  --------------------------------------------------------
  Gregory J. Rosmaita <oedipus@hicom.net>
     President, WebMaster, & Minister of Propaganda, 
          VICUG NYC <http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/vicug/>
  --------------------------------------------------------
  

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Thursday, 19 August 1999 03:25:09 UTC