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RE: FW: HTML - <abbr> and <acronym> settings

for

From: Karl Groves
Date: Mar 24, 2006 7:50AM

(Apologies for the top post. I hate the way IE quotes HTML formatted
e-mails)

Yup. I do agree with Tim.
UA's in general, be they graphical, aural, or something else, are unlikely
to be in a hurry to get the specs right if web authors aren't in a hurry,
too.

Let's face it. If I program something with PHP and I mess it up, the entire
application won't work. In fact, I don't know of ANY programming language
that works if you mess things up as bad as people mess up their markup.

We're in a vicious circle - user-agents don't support specs because authors
don't, either. Authors aren't inclined to follow specs if it renders in
their favorite user-agents.

What a great vision it would be if all of a sudden browsers refused to
display invalid markup (and what a great pay raise we'd get when our sites
were among the unfortunate few that actually still worked!)

Karl L. Groves
User-Centered Design, Inc.
Office: 703-729-0998
Mobile: 443-889-8763
E-Mail: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Web: http://www.user-centereddesign.com
<http://www.user-centereddesign.com/>;




_____

From: Kynn Bartlett [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2006 9:27 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Cc: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] FW: HTML - <abbr> and <acronym> settings


On 3/24/06, Tim Beadle < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:


The collective authors of the web (all n 100s of millions of us)
"should have gotten it right first time". I suspect that the current
brokenness of the major screen readers is a largely a function of the
brokenness of many of the web sites out there. They have to jump
through hoops to extract meaning from sites where it's not evident.
The recent trend towards meaningful, semantic HTML doesn't help one
jot if the AT doesn't understand...


Excellent point.

It's all really a mess...and we need to be careful about placing too much
blame squarely on one group (e.g. screenreader developers). I think both
you and Karl are saying something similar.

--Kynn