Re: What an international mess!

Rob writes:
   Actually, <acronym lang="la" title="exempli gratia" >e.g.</acronym>
   (maybe add "spellout" as an attribute too?)

   "i.e." and "e.g." are so common in English writing that they're hardly 
   italicized as foreign words anymore (that is, it's a bad exampe).

Whoah. That shouldn't stop someone marking them as foreign words
though. You can always leave the font-style set to Roman for a given
class via an attribute.

I've been experimenting in different fonts with the modern practice of
omitting the punctuation and putting "ie" and "eg" back into italics. 
In some cases it definitely improves the look of the text to get rid
of all those damned periods.

<rant>
Why has the US public such a love affair with unnecessary
abbreviation?  Shortening words (period or not) is fine when space is
tight, but when space is plentiful, it's a perversion.  Just yesterday
a friend sent me a web greetings card and when I went to look it up
and type in my code number, I found the box labelled "Enter your Code
Nbr". Like there was a national shortage of space.  Save those
electrons. A byte spared is a vote for freedom. Curb your Web. I've
seen people actually write and print "Amer." instead of "American"
when there is loads of space. And it's not helped by Microsoft making
the default for ordinal numerals the antique style superscript "st",
"nd", "rd" and "th", which is fine in 17th century printing but wholly
out of place in 1997.
</rant>

We now return you to your regular schedule...

///Peter

Received on Thursday, 25 September 1997 17:24:12 UTC