Hi,

Sidar's WCAG2-espa group has discussed this a bit, and the emerging 
consensus basically agrees with what Christian says below (which saves 
me a lot of typing ;-).

The point about expanding all instances, not just the first, is 
important to work with current technology - a paper presented by Sofia 
Celic looked into this. It's the kind of thing tools should do anyway - 
it's a pretty simple search/replace type script.

cheers

Chaals

Le Friday, 12 Dec 2003, à 22:02 Australia/Melbourne, Christian Wolfgang 
Hujer a écrit :

> My point:
> - - since acronyms aren't neccessarily pronouncable, it's required to 
> differ
> between acronyms and abbreviations for speech browsers; a separate, 
> e.g.
> class based scheme is required anyway, since for <abbr title="for
> example">e.g.</abbr> you'd might want to make an exception from the 
> rule to
> speak the title and want to spell out the element content instead. So 
> you'd
> need at least three classes to be implemented in an aural stylesheet:
> * spell out element content
> * read title
> * read element content
>
> - - the semantic value of marking up an abbreviation that is an acronym
> different from those abbreviation that aren't is very very little, for 
> me it
> even has no value at all; I'd rather wish for a <person/> element than 
> for a
> differentiation between those abbreviations that are acronyms and 
> those that
> aren't.
>
> - - Also, for transformations with XSLT <acronym/> gives no extra 
> value.
> Expanding <abbr>e.g.</abbr> and <acronym>Laser</acronym> using a 
> database
> works all the same.
>
> So differing between those two kinds of abbreviations that are 
> acronyms and
> that aren't isn't that important at all, I think. So I vote for 
> dropping
> <acronym/> (XHTML 2.0 probably does so).
>
> I think the WAI HTML Techniques Draft should state that it's important 
> to
> markup abbreviations at all, but it's not so important to markup those
> special abbreviations that are acronyms as such.
>
> Also I suggest that abbreviations are always marked up, not just the 
> first
> time, maybe the title can be given only the first time.
>
--
Charles McCathieNevile                          Fundación Sidar
charles@s...                                http://www.sidar.org