Re: Acronyms and abbreviations revisited

On Thu, 10 Jul 1997, Jason White wrote:

> Recently I have found time to read some sections of the HTML 4.0
> draft, now that it is publicly available. I have noticed that the
> suggestion for an ACRONYM element has been included, and that
> abbreviations are to be handled by client-side dictionaries. It is
> suggested that link elements in the document's head could provide
> references to dictionaries for specialised vocabularies. However,
> in the discussion of link types, no type value is given for
> abbreviation dictionaries. One solution might be:  <link
> rel="abbreviation" href="dictionary.html"> where "dictionary.html"
> is an HTML document in which each abbreviation and its expansion
> is given in a definition list. 

I was able to meet up with Daniel Dardailler last week in Sophia
Antipolis. We discussed this idea. Its not clear to me what format
is appropriate. The simplest format would be to place each
definition on a separate line, e.g.

  Dr	Doctor
  Mr	Mister
  ok	okay
  ....

A more sophistocated approach would allow one to specify the
pronunciation of the expanded form using a textual encoding
of phonemic/prosodic information. This would be contingent on
our choosing such an encoding, which is something we want to
do for HTML in any case. 

Maybe for now its best to just reserve a term for linking
abbreviation dictionaries.

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2521 (office) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Monday, 21 July 1997 12:05:20 UTC