Re: proper use of abbr and acronym

(Not posting to w3c-wait-ig, as I'm not on it).

Sean B. Palmer, at 21:50 -0000 on Fri, 17 Nov 2000, wrote:

> No, you're certainly not! This is a WAI matter (http://www.w3.org/WAI) as
> much as anything. You should mark up your HTML as semantically as possible
> (i.e. we all should); the points you have raised appear very relavent (and
> valuable) to me, and I hope they do to the rest of the WAI groups. The
> marking up of <acronym>/<abbr> within HTML contributes to its overall
> accessibility.

I entirely agree with this.

> I am (usually) against using class="[...]" to provide semantic information,
> but HTML doesn't provide us any other option! If I had my way we could all
> add Dublin Core to whatever attributes we wanted, and it would make the
> semanticization of XHTML a lot easier.
> There is no need to provide it as a <dfn> unless it is used in the context
> of (for example) a definition list, but inline.

This is an interesting solution, and I agree that using CSS to provide
semantics is a hack at best.  Another problem with it, if I understand
correctly, is that every instance of <acronym>XUL</acronym> will ended
with ("Xenophobic Underlay Limas"), in-text.  It doesn't seem quite as
useful to the user to have each instance marked as such explicitly, but
rather for there to be some sort of indication of "meaning available"
(e.g., implemented through tooltips or a reference of sorts).

-- 
Frank Tobin		http://www.uiuc.edu/~ftobin/

Received on Saturday, 18 November 2000 00:27:07 UTC