RE: Abbreviations and Acronyms: [techs] Latest HTML Techniques Draft

> Brian wrote: 
> > Abbreviations (and maybe alt tags for images) are metadata. 
> There will 
> > be added layers of complexity from what appears on the surface. 
> > Therefore a simple document markup language should leave 
> such issues 
> > to a richer and more appropriate language, such as RDF  
> (and to take 
> > on board Ernest Cline's message sent a few second's ago, if 
> > abbreviations aren't regarded as metadata they can be regarded as 
> > presentational and should therefore not be including in XHTML 2.0 - 
> > but for a different reason).
> > 
> > Abbreviations (and certainly alt tags for images) may be 
> metadata but 
> > they are also capable of being easily understood and deployed.  It 
> > would be desirable to include a lightweight way of provides support 
> > for such features in a new document markup language, as has 
> been done 
> > with HTML.
> > 
> > Comments?
> 
> Interesting thread all... We've been wondering about a few 
> things, and one of them is trying to enhance and further 
> extend the use of the <link> element by changing it... One of 
> the ways we thought it might be useful was in preparing 
> inline glossary functionality. This thread has me thinking 
> that we could combine it with some other format as Brian 
> suggested, but then be able to pull that functionality into 
> HTML via the <link> element...


Hi Derek
   Funnily enough, I was thinking the same thing.
   It's not a great leap to go from <abbr> contains metadata (and we
need to be able to make use of richer structures for the metadata) to
say that rather than embedding the metadata we should be able to link to
it ... And link to it in various richer ways.  So let's farm it out to
the XLink group!
   It did occur to me that rather than the author having to embed the
definitions, it would be nice to have them supplied, possibly by an
abbreviation bureau service (along the lines of PICS bureau services).


> I've posted a (mostly theoretical) article about this type of 
> functionality
> at: http://www.wats.ca/articles/extendinglinkrelationships/53
> 
> I'm curious to know what others think of that type of functionality...

   I guess my suggestion is along the lines of your suggestion for:

<link rel="glossary" for="wai" href="/glossary.php?wai" />

but allowing an additional level of redirection.

Anyway, thanks for the posting - but it's now time to go home.

Brian

> Cheers,
> Derek.
> --
> Derek Featherstone  feather@wats.ca
> Web Accessibility Specialist / Co-founder of WATS.ca
> Web Accessibility Testing and Services
> http://www.wats.ca   1.866.932.4878 (North America)
> 
>

Received on Friday, 12 December 2003 12:49:45 UTC