[html4all] ACRONYM and ABBR

[Gregory J. Rosmaita]

aloha!

the "title" element is ESSENTIAL and MUST be REQUIRED for ABBR 
for the #implied mechanism not only doesn't work, it is illogical 
when applied to abbreviated forms, as there are many abbreviated 
forms that share the same combination of letters, but which represent
completely different words/concepts:

ADA can be expanded to:

  * Americans With Disabilities Act
  * American Dental Association
  * American Diabetes Association
  * American Dietetic Association
  * the programming language "ADA" (named for Ada Lovelace)

what is needed, therefore, to make "title" an OPTIONAL attribute -- 
AFTER the first REQUIRED declaration of an ABBR -- is a FOR/ID mechanism 
for reuse of the expansion for the abbreviated form; moreover, there are 
thousands of acronyms that overlap, as discussed in:

HTML Needs Initialisms:
http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/AbbrAndInitialisms

the same re-use problem applies to DFN as well -- if one encases
an abbreviated form in an abbr without a title, but encases the
ABBR in a DFN element, then it is the DFN element that needs a 
reuse mechanism, and the optimal solution is not JUST the use 
of title for both, but a reuse mechanism that is universal, not
merely document specific...  the first instance of an ABBR or DFN 
MUST be glossed with an expansion via the "title" attribute, as 
well as an ID so that further incidents of the ABBR or DFN can be
bound to an initial expansion; obviously, a means of referring to 
an external resource containing a site-wide table of abbreviation
and definition expansions is a superior mechanism and that is the 
issue upon which we should be concentrating...

gregory.
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It is better to ask some of the questions than to know 
all the answers.                      -- James Thurber
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Gregory J. Rosmaita, oedipus at hicom.net
         Camera Obscura: http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus
Oedipus' Online Complex: http://my.opera.com/oedipus
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