- From: Philippe-Andre Prindeville <philipp@res.enst.fr>
- Date: Thu, 27 Jul 95 07:19:38 +0200
- To: michaelj@relay.relay.com (Michael Johnson), www-html@w3.org
On Jul 26, 11:05, Michael Johnson wrote: > Just to throw in my two cents, I think Ping is being premature to call for the > removal of these and some other tags. I can see how ACRONYM would be useful, > since a browser might render it all in caps in a reduced height font, as > acronyms are oftened rendered in printed media. Some of the others might have With all due respect Michael, I often read -- and appreciate -- your reasoned comments on the evolution of HTML 3.0, but here I think you aren't seeing the forest from the trees... The rendering of ACRONYM is of the most minor importance compared to its usefulness in generating indicies for automatic searches and for processing by knobots. What is the use of a search engine that doesn't turn up documents discussing "MIT" when you ask for a list of all pertinent information relating to the Massachussetts Institute of Technology? Or such software that gives you heaps of info on the Ministry of Industry and Technology (of Montenegro???) when you were interested in the above mentioned engineering school? At this point, the rendering of "MIT" because insignificant... since you probably won't be looking at the right info anyway. > These tags might be useful for search engines too, if someone wanted to search > for all the acronyms or authors or what have you in a search space. It's not a question of "too", or "incidentally". This is the principal raison-d'etre for this tag. Let's not forget that. Someday soon, I'm not going to have a 28.8kb/s network connection, but an ISDN PRI (2.048 or 1.536 Mb/s) connection to my home, not to speak of ATM or networking of the cable-TV company's fibre. Most of the HTML that will go through my workstation will pass through it much faster than I can read... rather it will be "digested" by my search engines which will read it for me while I do other things. Say, why doesn't the ENTITY for DFN appear in the HTML 3.0 DTD? I was just perusing it to verify some of Ping's comments and couldn't find it... -Philip
Received on Thursday, 27 July 1995 01:20:18 UTC