*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

  <abbr title="for example">e. g.</abbr>

nor

  <ruby class="abbr"><rb>e. g.</rb><rt>for example</rt></ruby>

or

  <abbr><ruby><rb>e. g.</rb><rt>for example</rt></ruby></abbr>,

but I'm willing to write

  <abbr>e. g.</abbr>

each time used, because of

  abbr {word-spacing: -0.2em}

and the hope that browsers that should do so, replace it automatically.
Of course "e. g." is common enough to expect screen-readers et al. to know it,
but I'm neither willing to write out (in an extra element xor attribute)
lesser known abbreviations every time. Likely I don't want to add &shy; at
every possible hyphenation point, but would gladly accept to include

  <link rel="hyphenationary" href="webdesign.en.hyph"/>,

if standardised and supported.

P.S.: I'm on the list, so no need for an extra copy.