Re: Titles for <ABBR> & <ACRONYM>

In making that recommendation, we were following the standard print
convention of only expanding the first occurrence of an unfamiliar
abbreviation or acronym in a document.  There was significant discussion on
the topic, with some members of the working group feeling strongly that all
occurrences should be marked up.  Others felt that this was too great a
burden on page authors, especially when the print convention was so
universally accepted.  Anyway, a consensus was reached with the "minimum"
requirement being to only mark up the first occurrence.  Of course, any
author is free to code all occurrences if they so choose.

One possibility is to tie this checkpoint to the  Authoring Tool working
group (if it is not already being considered).  Perhaps an authoring tool
could be given the "smarts" to prompt for the first expansion of an acronym
or abbreviation, then, optionally reuse the markup whenever the same string
is detected.

Regards,
Chuck Letourneau

At 16/06/99 02:07 PM , Guy M. Fisher wrote:
>I am trying to clarify checkpoint 4.2 of the Web Content Accessibility
>Guidelines which suggests using the <title> attribute to specify the
>expansion of each abbreviation or acronym in a document where it
>"first occurs."
>
>Is titling only the first occurrence adequate? What if a user skips
>past the first occurrence of an abbreviation?
>
>Thank you.
>
>
>Guy M. Fisher
>
>Cleveland, Ohio
>guy@squeakywheel.org
>

-----------
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group
cpl@starlingweb.com
(613) 820-2272

Received on Friday, 18 June 1999 07:06:40 UTC