----- Original Message -----
From: "Calogero Alex Baldacchino" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Pentasis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "WHAT Working Group" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 2:54 AM
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Feeedback on <dfn>, <abbr>, and other elements
Perhaps a silly idea: what if abbreviations could work as an img-map
couple? That is, i.e., an <abbr> without a title could avail of a,
let's
say, 'ref' attribute indicating the id of a previous <abbr> element
with
a title, and the former could be 'self-closing' (i.e. <abbr ref="#foo"
/>), so by default the UA would substitute it with the referenced
element content (the unexpanded abbreviation), and, at the user will
(when he/she clics on the abbreviation, or just stops the pointer, or
navigates to the abbreviation, or according to any setting in the
browser options) the abbreviation is expanded. (I guess the above won't
be agreed because of backward compatibility, though)
What problem would this solve? It's not like including the abbreviation
each time is a great burden.
Actually, it would solve a problem like this:
What if I style abbr so that the title attribute is shown after the
abbreviation:
abbr[title]:after {
content: " ("attr(title)")";
}
Now obviously I don't need and don't want to do this for every instance
of the abbreviation on the page visually (just the first one on each page
would be enough) , but I do want the title attribute to be expanded for
screenreaders on each instance.
Using this solution would enable the screenreaders to get the title
information from a previous instance, but at the same time would not
render it visually.
I'm not sure I've understood your aim. In my "half-proposal" the '<abbr
ref=#foo />' element should/could be thought as inheriting the title
attribute (and the abbreviation content) from the referenced '<abbr
id="foo" title"Foo Bar" >FB</abbr>', thus your example would expand the
title for any #foo reference, and should be part of a
screenreader-targeted style sheet. Was this your purpose?
Ah, then I misunderstood. I thought you meant that only the first instance
of an abbr would get a title and that any following instance would reference
that like so:
..<abbr id="foo" title="for example">e.g.</abbr>.......<abbr
href="#foo">e.g.</abbr>....
That way -I thought- one can retrieve the title attribute for other
instances (via scripting?)
But as Ian pointed out, this can also be done through CSS. Even though I
wonder if it is as flexible; authors -as opposed to designers- would
probably find this HTML construct better to work with than a CSS file. This
issue borders the question if CSS should be used for content manipulation
(other than styling I mean). But I am not sure, so I won't argue on the
subject.
But expanding on this idea, would it be beneficial to have some sort of
property in CSS that enables us to arbitrarily inherit? In other words, to
be able to have not only properties but also html-attributes inherit values
from elements that are not directly in the lineage of inheritance?
Bert
