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Re: Analyzing <abbr> solutions

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Mar 24, 2006 11:20AM

Kynn Bartlett wrote:

> Which is why I think that the general algorithm for defining expansion
> should go something like this:
>
> 1. The browser looks over the whole page, and finds all the <abbr> tags.
> 2. It makes an internal table to represent mappings of "abbreviated
> version" (from the content of the <abbr>) and "expanded version" (from
> any title attributes on the <abbr>s).
> 3. If there's not a title element on something that's an <abbr>, match
> the content back against the most recent previous occurrence of that
> abbreviated version, and use that expanded version.
> 4. Display the expanded version on first appearance (both visually and
> in synthesized speech) and cue (visually and by sound icon) on later
> appearances. The first appearance would be in display/render/reading
> order, so if you jump to an anchor the next one after the anchor is "first."
>
> Now, nobody does this, so again, pie-in-the-sky thinking of the
> "wouldn't it be nice?" variety. The user agents really should do
> something like this, it would be real nice and cut down on redundant
> markup as well as providing direct (not activated) access to the
> expanded version on first appearance.

Yup, the user agents should really start to become a lot smarter in this
respect. An additional method that would be quite smart: adding a
vocabulary file in RDF format or similar to the page via a LINK, and
have the UA refer to it for expanded versions of abbreviations etc.

Who knows...maybe one day we'll get there with all of the Semantic Web
malarkey *grin*

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke
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