> 
> > I wonder whether there may be circumstances in which a 
> rigourous exact 
> > definition may be important - perhaps in legal documents; 
> scientific 
> > pages, etc?
> 
> Yes, I'd buy that. I'd also accept the possibility of the 
> inverse case, where 
> many of the different (whether subtly or strikingly so) 
> definitions, nuances, 
> etymological references and so on could be identified (say 
> for an in-depth 
> analysis of a poem or another piece of literature).
> 
> I'd see both of these as being specialist applications 
> though, providing the 
> framework (perhaps through RDF or similar) may be a suitable 
> task for an 
> application not tasked with providing for that specific 
> speciality, but 
> providing the full capability in a language like HTML seems a 
> bit much.

That's a perfectly reasonable suggestion.

I guess the options are:

Abbreviations (and maybe alt tags for images) are metadata.  There will
be added layers of complexity from what appears on the surface.
Therefore a simple document markup language should leave such issues to
a richer and more appropriate language, such as RDF  (and to take on
board Ernest Cline's message sent a few second's ago, if abbreviations
aren't regarded as metadata they can be regarded as presentational and
should therefore not be including in XHTML 2.0 - but for a different
reason).

Abbreviations (and certainly alt tags for images) may be metadata but
they are also capable of being easily understood and deployed.  It would
be desirable to include a lightweight way of provides support for such
features in a new document markup language, as has been done with HTML.

Comments?

Brian
 
---------------------------------------
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath 
BATH
BA2 7AY
Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
Web: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ 
Phone: 01225 383943
FOAF: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/b.kelly/foaf/bkelly-foaf.xrdf 
For info on FOAF see http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/b.kelly/foaf/ 

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