Re: Suggestion: change abbr to full word

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On Mon, 4 Nov 2002 15:21:37 +0800 
"YANG,JI-FENG (HP-China,ex2)" <ji-feng.yang@hp.com> wrote:

| A suggestion for the future of XHTML: change the tags from abbr to full
| word. This kind of tags include p, q ,a, em, ul, dl, dt, ol and so on.
| For example change "p" to "paragraph". 

Full word tags are aesthetically nicer (IMHO), but present some ractical problems. 

Firstly, a minor one -- they're bigger, so take longer to download. 

Secondly, and probably more importantly for most of us, they're more effort to type out. Consider:

<html>...</html>
- -vs-
<hypertext-markup-language>...</hypertext-markup-language>

Lastly, it breaks backwards-compatibility. Sure, occasionally backwards-compatibility needs to be broken -- keeping it for the sake of keeping it is a mistake -- but it is still a factor to be considered.

A better solution is to try to make sure that all new tags are full words, but preferably short words -- like the proposed <line> tag.

- -- 
Toby A Inkster BSc ARCS
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Received on Monday, 4 November 2002 14:17:37 UTC