11 Spans in abbreviations

Using Opera 8.5, I cam across some interesting problems with some of your abbreviations.

Specifically, the ones coded as, eg, <abbr title=”…”><span class=“caps”>WCAG</span></abbr>. These appeared with a dotted underline, but I could only get the tooltip if I moused-over the dotted line, as soon as the cursor moved over the text, the tooltip disappeared.

I couldn’t even see a declaration for .caps – given that the content was typed in capitals in the source, what is the purpose of it?

posted at 05:04 pm on January 17, 2006 by Stephen Down

12 Beyond the death of Acronym

While it’s true that XHTML 2.0 isn’t yet a viable spec, I think there’s value in looking ahead — particularly when the spec-in-progress seems to be moving toward a good decision like the removal of the acronym tag.

<acronym> will be with us for a long time yet. IE6 will not be eradicated at the drop of a hat (unfortunately!), and the fact is that using the acronym tag does work more readily for most current browsers than abbr does, once you have found ways to hack it to work in IE6 … only to find this breaks it in other browsers.

So how about a mongrel … OK, so it wouldn’t be valid <acronym title=“eXtensible HyperText Markup Langauge”><abbr title=“eXtensible HyperText Markup Langauge”>XHTML</abbr></acronym> 2.0, but would nesting the tags like that work across different browsers?

posted at 05:08 pm on January 17, 2006 by Stephen Down

13 AAAcronym or AAAbreviation?

Excuse my ignorance, but in the original article and all subsequent posts, no one defined the acronym AAA. Would someone be so kind as to give me a clue? I’d appreciate it.

posted at 05:29 pm on January 17, 2006 by Joseph P. Dempsey, Sr.

14 Links

Be careful with the links though, (13.1.2) as all anchor elements are required not to use the same link text to refer to different resources.

Personally, I find this a very thought provoking article, but there is too much code for my liking… I will stick to providing support for the good browsers, and sod IE6, not worth my time catering for every one of its deficiencies (but don’t mind spending a few/many hours fixing its CSS bugs).

posted at 06:23 pm on January 17, 2006 by Craig Francis

15 Nesting ABBR and Acronym

but would nesting the tags like that work across different browsers?

In theory, no. XHTML 2.0 is strict, strict, strict. That means you’d have to serve the page as application/xml and not text/html. Isn’t it supposed to be that the rendering of the page would then fail in a compliant browser since the page is technically an application and not a text file?

posted at 07:11 pm on January 17, 2006 by John Lascurettes

16 For the sake of example...

As long as we’re speaking of abbreviations and semantics, that “e.g.” in the glossary should have the title “Latin; For the sake of example,” (or “Latin; For example”) rather than merely “for example.” I only say this because that is essentially what was done for the French term mentioned earlier.

posted at 08:35 pm on January 17, 2006 by Mark Thomas

17 Re: For the sake of example ...

I agree with this statement.

In the article, I noticed that there is a single use of “i.e.” that is served with a Latin language type, but the title attribute’s value is “that is”, but this was not done for “e.g.”. Why was this?

posted at 10:16 pm on January 17, 2006 by Brian LePore

18 RMS

The definition of RMS in the glossary is not quite right. RMS is the square root of the average of the squares, and not the square of the average of the square roots.

posted at 02:11 am on January 18, 2006 by Jason Merrill

19 Here we go again

Once again, an article on accessibility seems to alienate most web pros. Indeed the greater the number of A s it’s trying to achieve the greater the reaction. This is because ‘accessible to all’ is an unreasonable, if not unattainable, goal.
For instance, I would argue that the under-10 age group is a larger segment of web users than the disabled. Therefore, all web pages should be written in the style of ‘Janet and John’ books to make them readable by this group and, as a side-affect, those adults who are ‘literally-challenged’ though it will probably turn most of the rest of us off as well as making almost all the web sites I’ve ever visited inaccessible including this one. I fully expect the next issue of ALA to not contain any words with more than 3 syllables, if you’re serious.
Having said that, I have no problem with making sites as accessible as possible to THE AUDIENCES THEY ARE AIMED AT. Indeed, I try to make my designs comply to double-A guidelines though I’m not quite there yet. My biggest problem is that I write in English, for an English speaking audience, but live in a non-English speaking country so I have to remember to use the LANG attribute whenever I use local placenames, real names, etc. and HREFLANG whenever I link to a local site.
This article was useful for an insight into how a screen reader works, information that I have sought in the past without success, but what is really needed is an assistive-technology equipped browser (come on you Open Sourcers) that designers can use to test pages, as they do with the visual types, without having to fork-out the obscene prices that I’ve seen for currently available apps. That’s another thing! Perhaps instead of their tendency to bleat, organisations for the disabled should commission someone (mozilla.org??) to write one. That would be a real benefit to their constituency as well as the people who produce the sites. In the meantime, we have to rely on, mostly contradictory, articles on accessibility or design to the technical standards and hope for the best.
On a lighter note, you missed an abbreviation in ‘Mark W. Everson’. I want to know what ‘W’ stands for. It must be important or it wouldn’t be there.

posted at 09:11 am on January 18, 2006 by Mike Stone

20 "AAA-level compliant pages meet the needs of every

That’s true of Web Content Authoring Guideline (WCAG) 1.0, but there’s no such demand in the current Working Draft 2.0 (so far as I have found).

In fact, conformance is defined relative to a technology baseline. AAA may not even require achieving all level 3 checkpoints.

Which is just as well, because (despite this excellent article) AAA as it stands is either impossible or undesirable for any website that is aimed at a specific audience.

posted at 12:44 pm on January 18, 2006 by Dave Nolan

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