Re: ABBR support (was Re: Promotion of XHTML)

At 09:58 -0800 UTC, on 1/7/03, Tantek Çelik wrote:

> On 1/7/03 8:03 AM, "Sander Tekelenburg" <tekelenb@euronet.nl> wrote:

[...]

> What there _is_ in CSS2 is this (sorry I should have given the URL earlier):
>
>  http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/sample.html
>
> <blockquote>
>
>  ABBR, ACRONYM   { font-variant: small-caps; letter-spacing: 0.1em }
>
> </blockquote>
>
> For capitals to be transformed to small-caps, there would also need to be a
> declaration of "text-transform:lowercase"

Initially I didn't see the logic behind this at all. It seemed to me that
{font-variant: small-caps} automatically implies a text-transform. But
reading your reponse, and upon rereading the CSS 2 spec's "In a small-caps
font, the glyphs for lowercase letters look similar to the uppercase ones
[...]", and allowing my thoughts a couple of days to rearrange thelselves, I
think I now understand why IE does what it does. Thanks for giving me
something to think about ;)

> , which is not present in the above
> style rule.  You might say that lack of that declaration is a bug in CSS2.

Hm... Yes, maybe this should be considered a bug. I'm not sure. I think that,
more importantly, it might be good to add a note to
<http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html#propdef-font-variant>, saying
something like

	"Note that font-variant does <EM>not</EM> automatically imply a
	text-transform. For instance, {font-variant: small caps} only applies to
	lowercase text. To have it apply to capitals, {text-transform: lowercase}
	must be added."

I think that many people would be as confused as I was when asking for
small-caps doesn't 'work' on capitals.

> If you believe that to be the case, could you say so in a post to www-style?

I'll consider posting a suggestion to add the above mentioned note to the CSS
specs.

[...]

>> I ask myself why the authors of the spec would have
>> bothered to add an ABBR element at all then?
>
> Because semantics and presentation are not the same thing. [...]

Right. Plain silly of me to have overlooked that.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

Received on Sunday, 12 January 2003 15:12:08 UTC