On 3 Dec 2007, at 18:58, Scott Reynen wrote:
On Dec 3, 2007, at 11:18 AM, Ben Ward wrote:
<abbr class="geo point-20" title="+22.31119;
+89.86145">
Rayenda, Bangladesh
</abbr>
There's no way that ‘+22.31119;+89.86145’ is an abbreviation of
‘Rayenda, Bangladesh’.
Without commenting on the truthfulness of the statement, the above
syntax says the opposite: that "Rayenda, Bangladesh" is an
abbreviation of "+22.31119;+89.86145." The title attribute is the
long form, not the abbreviation. I don't know if this is just
careless language or actual confusion, but this has come up
multiple times and I think it's important we're all clear on what
the markup asserts if we're going to have a discussion about the
truthfulness of that assertion.
You are completely correct, not a misunderstanding on my part, I just
wrote the wrong thing (I've been rather ill, my brain isn't joining
all the dots in the right order at this point).
I stand by point, and I think the examples on geo-brainstorming are
dangerous.
Premasagar, the ‘brainstorming’ pages are just that, and shouldn't be
considered part of the specification itself. I'm sorry that our pages
are misleading like that.
The critical part of the HTML4 spec that causes ‘Rayenda, Bangladesh’
*not* to be an abbreviation of ‘22.31119;+89.86145’ is this:
> “The content of the ABBR and ACRONYM elements specifies the
abbreviated expression itself, as it
> would normally appear in running text. The title attribute of
these elements may be used to provide
> the full or expanded form of the expression.”
> “as it would normally appear in running text.”
Whilst I appreciate the HTML4 spec can be a little vague sometimes,
in this case it's pretty clear: ABBR is not for fuzzy approximations,
it's for abbreviated expressions. I think we've got to be really
delicate and careful about this. Microformats prides itself on
building technologies on top of existing standards. The abbreviation
pattern is a neat parsing trick, but you've gotta meet the
requirements of the underlying technology.
Regards,
Ben
For reference, the section from the HTML4 spec regarding ABBR and
ACRONYM
ABBR:
Indicates an abbreviated form (e.g., WWW, HTTP, URI, Mass., etc.).
ACRONYM:
Indicates an acronym (e.g., WAC, radar, etc.).
The ABBR and ACRONYM elements allow authors to clearly indicate
occurrences of abbreviations and acronyms. Western languages make
extensive use of acronyms such as "GmbH", "NATO", and "F.B.I.", as
well as abbreviations like "M.", "Inc.", "et al.", "etc.". Both
Chinese and Japanese use analogous abbreviation mechanisms, wherein
a long name is referred to subsequently with a subset of the Han
characters from the original occurrence. Marking up these
constructs provides useful information to user agents and tools
such as spell checkers, speech synthesizers, translation systems
and search-engine indexers.
The content of the ABBR and ACRONYM elements specifies the
abbreviated expression itself, as it would normally appear in
running text. The title attribute of these elements may be used to
provide the full or expanded form of the expression.
Here are some sample uses of ABBR:
<P>
<ABBR title="World Wide Web">WWW</ABBR>
<ABBR lang="fr"
title="Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer">
SNCF
</ABBR>
<ABBR lang="es" title="Doña">Doña</ABBR>
<ABBR title="Abbreviation">abbr.</ABBR>
Note that abbreviations and acronyms often have idiosyncratic
pronunciations. For example, while "IRS" and "BBC" are typically
pronounced letter by letter, "NATO" and "UNESCO" are pronounced
phonetically. Still other abbreviated forms (e.g., "URI" and "SQL")
are spelled out by some people and pronounced as words by other
people. When necessary, authors should use style sheets to specify
the pronunciation of an abbreviated form.
— http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1
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