On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Christoph Päper wrote:

>
>*Charles McCathieNevile*:
>> On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Christoph Päper wrote:
>>
>>>a author should be able to help it out---outside the
>>>mark-up. It's quite similar to automatic hyphenation.
>>
>> Exactly. The main point of my mail was to suggest that we could specify
>> what is required in existing CSS, which seems like a big win.
>
>You missed my point. Regardless of ways of implementation, I don't want to
>clutter my pages with
[stuff]

Oh. Me neither.

>but I'm willing to write
>
>  <abbr>e. g.</abbr>
>and the hope that browsers that should do so, replace it automatically.

Well, that's something. As it happens, browsers don't seem to do it. You
could write a script that post-processed your pages, to turn what you are
prepared to write into what users can actually get value from in the software
they have available.

I believe that a design principle here is that tings should be self-contained
- the more special-magic processing you need to do on a given element, the
less happy the HTML group is. Which is why the slightly verbose stuff seems
to get there.

Personally I avoid touching source code if at all possible, since decent
tools (the very few) get it right, whereas I make typos and find it hard to
read. Which strongly colours the way I see verbose source code as an issue.
But I claim that this puts me in touch with the masses and what they really
care about...

cheers

Chaals