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

On Wed, 25 Feb 2004, Jesper Tverskov wrote:

> http://www.smackthemouse.com/20040108
>
> ABBR and ACRONYM are for user agents not for end users.

An interesting treatise, which I hope to read in detail later.
Just a quick note:

"The draft for XHTML 2.0 clearly states, and this statement was also in
the specification for HTML 4.0, that pronunciation is presentation and
should not be a part of mark-up."

This creates an interesting asymmetry, since spelling would equally well
be presentation, and yet nobody proposes that it be delegated to
style sheets and removed from HTML.

Since human language (almost always) exists both in spoken and in written
form, why would the other (and far older) form be regarded as
"presentation only"?

We cannot describe pronunciation in much detail without using fairly
complicated machinery (like IPA). But at least we could use some basic
markup that makes it possible to specify the intended spoken form in a
rough way.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2004 03:17:11 UTC