Re: [html] "title" text semantics, and "minor" element discussion

On Tue, 18 Oct 2005, Jens Meiert wrote:

> But screenreaders, for example, read the title, so doesn't it definitely
> make sense to allow e.g. "abbr" elements for abbreviations, addressed and
> "styled" via "speech" media type?

No. It is generally unsound to assume that every abbreviation should be 
expanded when read aloud. You would surely not want to listen to a 
document that discusses XHTML so that each and every occurrence of "XHTML"
is spelled out as "Extensible Hypertext Markup Language".

In order to be able to suggest stylistic features for parts of a piece of 
text, you generally need _some_ markup elements for the parts. This is one 
reason why putting data into attributes is a bad idea: attributes are by 
definition limited to plain text.

The <title> element is a different issue, and I only explained the 
general _background_ (history). In a closer analysis, it might turn out 
that the different actual and potential uses of <title> element contents 
call for different approaches, at least the ability of specifying, in a 
document, a short, normal, and long version of the title text. Whether
markup is allowed inside them is a different matter.

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

Received on Tuesday, 18 October 2005 13:03:03 UTC