- From: Holger Wahlen <wahlen@ph-cip.Uni-Koeln.DE>
- Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 21:05:25 +0200
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Monday, 28 Jul 1997 08:30:21 -0400, Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> wrote: | Perhaps the HTML 4.0 spec should replace ACRONYM by a new | attribute on SPAN, e.g. | | The <span spellout>BBC</span> tonight reported heavy | shelling on the Boznian capital. It has been argued afterwards that this is something presentational and hence more suitable for CSS, so that it would be more appropriate to deal with this in the way "CLASS=spellout" instead - okay. The question I'd like to bring up is a different one, namely whether it should be SPAN at all here that should get such an attribute. Maybe I'm just making things too complicated, but I'd suggest to distinguish between information about the words of a document seen within that document and such about the words, well, just as words. Two examples. (1) Look at a sentence like this, first with physical markup: That <I>really</I> must be taken <I>cum grano salis</I>. The purpose of the italics in the first case is simply emphasis, so this becomes EM in logical markup. At the end they are used to indicate a foreign phrase - HTML doesn't have a special element for that, so SPAN CLASS=foreign or something like that would be appropriate. (2) Let me modify the example the 4.0 draft uses in the section about DIV and SPAN: Imagine a database with only two fields, people's last name and their homepage URL. To make a document of that, DIV and SPAN can be used like this: <DIV ID=client-boyera CLASS=client> <SPAN CLASS=client-last-name>Last name:</SPAN> Boyera, <SPAN CLASS=client-url>Homepage URL:</SPAN> http://foo.com/~boyera/ </DIV> and so on. Now there's the abbreviation "URL", and I'd like to indicate this is pronounced by spelling it out, so that I help speech browsers that don't know this already - after all, "URL" is a rather uncommon expression on the Web. ;-) That could look like this: <SPAN CLASS=client-url>Homepage <SPAN CLASS=spellout>URL</SPAN>: </SPAN> http://foo.com/~boyera/ Now, in my view there are two basic kinds of element contents involved in these examples: "Really" in (1) and "homepage URL" in (2) only get that markup in these specific documents, but "cum grano salis" is *always* a foreign phrase, and "URL" is *always* an abbreviation of the `spell-out' kind, no matter what context they appear in - this is information about the words themselves. Wouldn't it be more logical to have a separate element for that, and only to use SPAN to convey information that just makes sense in the given context? I don't have a good name idea yet, but if we used "ET" (from "etymology"), for instance, things could look this way: <ET CLASS=foreign LANG=la>cum grano salis</ET>, <ET CLASS=spellout>URL</ET>. To continue this train of thought: There have been ideas for an element like PERSON - that would be another example of rather telling something about a word itself than about its function in a certain document, wouldn't it? So maybe this wouldn't have to be implemented as an element of its own, but a construction like <ET CLASS=person> might do already. Or think about <ET CLASS=place>Washington <ET CLASS=spellout>DC</ET></ET> ... Comments? ____ |__| / Holger // mailto:wahlen@ph-cip.uni-koeln.de ____ | |/|/ Wahlen // http://www.ph-cip.uni-koeln.de/~wahlen/
Received on Tuesday, 29 July 1997 15:05:33 UTC