- From: John Lewis <lewi0371@mrs.umn.edu>
- Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 16:39:03 -0600
- To: www-html@w3.org
Michael wrote on Monday, March 3, 2003 at 12:27:49 AM:
> [In XHTML 2.0, shorten the "abbr" element to "a".]
Although it would be confusing for HTML4/XHTML1 authors learning
XHTML2, they cannot be expected to learn XHTML2 without reading at
least a little about XHTML2 anyway.
My main concern is that abbr isn't used enough to warrant a one-letter
name. I think (for example) the title attribute is more worthy of a
single letter name. It's used much more than the abbr element and
there isn't a previous attribute named "t" to my knowledge. Plus, it
would benefit the abbr element almost as much as shortening its own
name. Here's an example:
<abbr title="extensible markup language">XML</abbr>
<a title="extensible markup language">XML</a>
<abbr t="extensible markup language">XML</abbr>
I think abbr is of an optimal length considering how much it's used.
Especially if you consider that the content of the title attribute
often overwhelms the size of the opening and closing tags (as above),
and especially if you consider that abbr will always need both opening
and closing tags, so the practical difference in size will be from
thirteen keystrokes to seven (not four to one), which seems even less
attractive.
Related:
http://www.w3.org/People/Bos/DesignGuide/readability.html
--
John
Received on Monday, 3 March 2003 17:38:52 UTC