RE: proper use of abbr and acronym

> From:	Frank Tobin [SMTP:ftobin@uiuc.edu]
> 
> the expansion.  However, XUL is still being tagged up at every step, which
> is labor-intensive (and hence, many authors will not use the method).
	[DJW:]  
	Most authors won't even know the elements exist; of the
	rest, most will only be interested in what font style
	and size they produce (regardless of whether the content 
	really is an abbrevation or acronym)!

	This seems to be a good case for automation; if you markup
	the first occurrence, an automated tools can then scan for
	the remaining ones.  One could then use a special style sheet
	to make them stand out to ease the removal of false positives.
	(I believe good index generation systems take a dictionary of
	indexing terms rather than requiring every occurence ot be
	marked.)

> In order to help poing to the <dfn> tag, the user-agent could keep a table
> of <dfn> tags already processed, and can reference them later.
> 
	[DJW:]  Where is the market for this; without an apparent
	market, the big 2 aren't going to add this to their user
	agents.

> 3)  Same as 2), but do not markup instances of the term XUL that are not
> in the <dfn> tag.
	[DJW:]  
	This will cause text to speech systems to try and pronounce
	abbreviations, or spell them out in unexpected ways.  (I'm
	not sure that JAWS/IE actually handles these elemsnts, and 
	doubt that there is anything better.)

	In practice, I think you need the title for text to speech,
	as such tools are unlikely to look at previous uses and 
	there might be cases where the same character string is used
	in more than one way.

> instead we are talking about the W3C in the document, should we tag each
> instance as pointing to http://www.w3.org/, or just the first?  Should we
> use a <dfn> tag at the first instance if we don't tag later instances?
	[DJW:]  
	Hyperlinking every occurrence is noisy; I don't think it
	is a good idea.

	Note that you have used "tag" where you mean "element".

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Received on Friday, 17 November 2000 11:49:34 UTC