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Posted by Spartanicus on 02/13/06 22:27
Marcus Stollsteimer <marcus314@yahoo.com> wrote:
[About <abbr> and <acronym>]
>1. how should these elements be best used (and what is a good reason
>for using them in the first place)?
You've not told us what qualifications you would apply to consider
something a "good" reason. The basic reason to use most markup is to
apply structure and semantics to the content. In that sense
abbreviations and acronyms are no different from headings and
paragraphs.
Things get shady when you start looking for real world practical
benefits. Some speech renderers can be configured to read out title
content for abbreviations and acronyms, but as you can imagine that
becomes a pain if the abbreviation is used more than once and title
content is provided every time.
In theory, for the benefit of speech agents abbreviations and acronyms
should be supplied with meta data that indicates whether it should be
spelled out or pronounced as a word (for example NATO). This can be done
with aural CSS, but the only clients that support the required CSS are
Emacspeak (used by practically no-one), and Opera. Opera's speech engine
is not installed by default, and Opera's speech capabilities are
intended to encourage development of applications that use voice
operation of the browser. Opera is not suitable to be used as an AT
browser.
AT speech renderers use built in lists of commonly used abbreviations
and render them in a pre configured way, some are spelled out, others
are expanded, regardless of whether the abbreviation is marked up or
naked.
>When the meaning of the abbreviation is not clear
How would you know? whether or not *you* know the meaning of an
abbreviation doesn't mean that a visitor will know.
>, it should be explained in the _text_, not
>in the title attribute, shouldn't it?
Expanding an abbreviation in round brackets after it's first usage on a
page is a good practice when it can reasonably be expected that the
resource will be read from the top down. This may not work if the
resource is linked to with fragment anchors.
>2. what is the difference between them (or: why not always use
><abbr>)?
IIRC the XHTML 2 proposals have dropped the <acronym> element because of
the reasoning you mentioned elsewhere in the thread: that acronyms are a
special form of abbreviations.
--
Spartanicus
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