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From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Wed, Apr 23 2003 5:27AM
Subject: RE: New [free] accessibility tools - Acronym and abbreviation gen erator
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Ian,

Instead of screen scraping, why not parse the page located at the URL and
pull out all the information regarding the acronyms and abbreviations
located at that place. I think that is what Kynn is suggesting.

I like the idea. It means you can create a dictionary of acronyms and
abbreviations which new people can use and which your app also can use to
add the appropriate mark-up to other pages on a site.

-----Original Message-----
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Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2003 4:34 AM
To: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Subject: Re: New [free] accessibility tools - Acronym and abbreviation
generator


::> Interesting. I think the weakness is the acronym
library itself.
::> Obviously, this is only going to be a useful
application for
::> people who write content with the same
abbreviations as you! :)

Granted, and there will be a problem when I reach two
acronyms that mean different things to different
people, e.g. AA = Alcoholics Anonymous or Automobile
Association?

::> Here's what I propose to fix that.
::>
::> You should include the ability to choose from the
following
::> kinds of acronym libraries:
::>
::> (1) The default one, maintained by Accessify.

Yep

::> (2) A library uploaded via file upload from the
user's local
::> hard drive.
::>
::> (3) A library specified by URL.
::>
::> What should a "library" consist of? Simple --
it's just any HTML
::> page. Acrobot should scan that file for existing
<acronym>/<abbr>
::> tags, and construct a list of abbreviations. This
then forms the
::> library for that run of the program.

All good in theory, but here's where I run into
problems. With my current host, I cannot
screen-scrape, and therefore cannot easily pull text
off a page and interrogate it/manipulate it in ASP.

If anyone has any ideas that could help me to achieve
what Kynn's suggesting, that'd be grand.

If nothing else, perhaps I could just define a few
categories of acronyms/abbreviations and add them to
the database manually - then it could be an option on
the tool - "choose acronyms from the computing and
accessibility, scientific, astronomy category" etc etc

The final option would be to take a chance and simply
let *anyone* update the database. Of course, this is
open to abuse, so I'd have to check regularly !


====Ian Lloyd
Accessify - http://www.accessify.com/
Who am i? - http://www.webstandards.org/about/bios/illoyd.html

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