[whatwg] Feeedback on <dfn>, <abbr>, and other elements related to cross-references

Calogero Alex Baldacchino alex.baldacchino at email.it
Wed Nov 26 16:22:31 PST 2008


Ian Hickson ha scritto:
> On Wed, 23 Apr 2008, Jon Gibbins (dotjay) wrote: 
>> In my opinion, a more useful solution is to offer some form of 
>> infrastructure for glossaries where abbreviations can be uniquely 
>> identified to an expanded form. This would aid disambiguation and give 
>> control of rendering to users via their user agent.
> 
> I don't see why just having the title="" attribute isn't enough.
> 
> 
> I've added a note to the spec that says that authors shouldn't expect a UA 
> to expand abbreviations just based on earlier <abbr> elements with the 
> same contents.
> 

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)
 
 
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