[textile] Abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, etc)

zem · 2007-02-20 03:18:05

Special handling for common contractions like Mr. and Inc. should be low priority in my opinion. It’s pretty rare for any style guide to recommend expanding them (and yeah, I know the strictest accessibility guidelines do). Constructing an awkward syntax for the sake of supporting a rarely used style seems counterproductive to me.

I’d suggest:

ABC(Some Text) -> acronym
abc(Some Text) -> abbreviation
A.B.C.(Some Text) -> initialism
A.B.(Some Text) -> initialism
AB(Some Text) -> nothing
a.b.c.(Some Text) -> nothing
abc.(Some Text) -> nothing

Where “acronym”, “abbreviation” and “initialism” are handled and marked up as appropriate. (They might all use the “abbr” tag, for example, but with slightly different classes or other handling). Whitespace before the left paren would mean no special handling.

That probably breaks backwards compatibility.

The last item could be handled as an abbreviation, but I think it’d lead to too many false positives. The second one might too. To work around that, perhaps we could use markup that has minimal effect for those cases – perhaps something like <abbr text="Some Text">abc</abbr>(Some Text), so that an accidental false positive still preserves the intended appearance.

Last edited by zem (2007-02-20 03:37:55)

Destry · 2007-02-20 07:40:25

What about a leading lower-case “a” as the distinguishing mark between an acronym and abbr?

FAQa(Frequently Asked Questions)

Oh, zem’s on it… Uh, yeah, that was my thinking too, use the same model but distinguish it somehow. I actually like the first three, zem. Seems straightforward enough.

Jeremie · 2007-02-20 11:03:04

maniqui wrote:

Mr..(Mister)
WWW.(World Wide Web)
But that seems a bit confusing…

Textile may confuse them. It’s quite possible to have a sentence like that: some text, some text on the WWW. Some other text

Or maybe, more similar to Textile for links.
"Mr.".Mister
"Corp.".Corporation

A little heavy, that close to be as “complex” as raw html (which Textile supports).

Destry · 2007-03-03 15:43:14

marios wrote:

I have been reading and seeing in a couple of places, that most likely W3C is going to drop acronym into deprecated mode entirely and keep only abbreviations as a standard.

Looks like that’s in fact the direction…

As I learned in this very interesting article, X/HTML 5 Versus XHTML 2, the acronym element is gone in XHTML 2, only abbr will be supported. (I’m happy about that, but it’s going to require a lot of hunt-n-fix in my articles over time.) I’ll be using abbr from here on out to be forward compatible.

I’ve been watching this HTML4 / XHTML 1 split with curiosity and wondering if I should change my way (I’m in the XHTML camp) since some respected standardistas like Roger Johansson favor HTML 4 (at the time of this writing). However, I just don’t get why go backwards with HTML and support another spec (HTML 5), especially after Tim Berner’s Lee basically said the whole reason for maintaining an HTML working group in parallel with the XHTML group is because XHTML proved to be too heady for the bulk of the worlds Web designers so there “recasting the net” for the laggards and holding there hands a little longer.

Anyway, after reading that article, I’m happy where I am and will stay with XHTML until the W3C ever officially stops supporting it.

Last edited by Destry (2007-03-03 15:51:15)

marios · 2007-03-03 20:29:30

Aha, interesting. I didn’t know that these workgroups have split partly outside of the W3C.
However, Ian Hickson is in it, so it means, it is something solid.

I also favor XHTML stict for now. It helps me to write clean pages.
( eg.: validate, and you know where you are wrong.Sort of, since the validator can have bugs as well )
One could do the same in HTML4.01 as well, but it wouldn’t force you so much to take care of everything.

However, those are all future specs, I believe partly to have something more compatible for webapplications.

So there is nothing wrong with XHTML for a couple of Years from now, I think.

P.S.: Just reading through some of these docs, it says, that one reason, for HTML5, is to avoid that some Browsers (IE)
render in quirksmode by giving them an unexistant Doctype.
It would be interesting to read through all the comments on the whatwg.org blog.
( However, may be another time )

regards, marios

Last edited by marios (2007-03-03 20:52:16)

Logoleptic · 2007-03-24 01:14:05

Destry wrote:

By the way, <abbr> is now supported in IE7, but you probably know that, so the old debate about using the incorrect <acronym> tag for anything other than a true acronym just to kiss IE’s ass is no longer even a plausible consideration.

As of this month, 60% of the IE users who visit my personal site are still running IE6. My professional site is a whole different story, since it tends to attract other people in the web design / development field.

For those of us who create sites that must reach a general audience, backward compatibility isn’t a matter of “kissing ass.” It’s a practical consideration, a service to our clients, and a courtesy to our clients’ customers.

I’m sorry if this post comes across as overly blunt. I’ve seen a lot of hobbyists and markup purists make arguments like yours, however, and such arguments have almost nothing to do with the actual “working Web.” From visiting your site, I can see that you clearly aren’t a hobbyist. You’re enthusiastic about Web standards — as am I — but adherence to those standards should not become a dogma. It should always be balanced with analysis-based practicality. Right now, the numbers simply don’t support abandoning <acronym> or making <abbr> the default. Neither do the W3C specs: <acronym> remains valid except in XHTML 2, which is still unfinished and controversial.

Having a Textile syntax for <abbr> might be useful for some people, but one could also argue that it adds needless duplication. If someone knows enough to make a distinction between the two tags, they could easily add the desired tag manually. There is only so far you can stretch a text processor like Textile and still have it be “humane.” Let’s not overburden this friendly end-user tool with extensions that will only be of interest to geeks.

marios · 2007-04-02 10:30:21

I have here a tricky question regarding real greek abbreviations. In Greek in abbreviations ( and in acronyms as well ), a period is appended to to the Capital letter. Below is an example for a greek abbreviation ( I’ve coined this term, to localize the MLP abbreviation )

Example:

Α.Π.Τ. ( Abbreviation for: ‘Αρθρωμα Πολυγλωσσικής Τοπικηποίησης )

MLP ( Multi Language Pack in english )

Of course then Textile will not turn this over into an HTML acronym tag, if I use:

Α.Π.Τ.(‘Αρθρωμα Πολυλωσσικής Τοπικοποίησης )

Are there any other examples in other languages, where this would be the case ? How would Textile deal with these lang specific differences ?

regards, marios

Last edited by marios (2007-04-05 08:26:26)

Jeremie · 2007-04-05 02:47:41

French: acronyms never takes dot. Abbreviations often does, but not always.

However, remember that Textile handle in acronyms, not abbreviations (since several major UA doesn’t understand the abbreviation HTML tag). If you want real abbreviation, you can use the HTML tag for it.

Mary · 2007-04-05 17:16:30

Thinking aloud: with all these differences per language (Abbreviations and so on), I wonder if it isn’t worth it to consider Textile English but plugable (extends, etc). Then you could have a French addon or Greek addon. Wouldn’t that make things much simpler in the long run?

marios · 2007-04-05 19:32:29

Mary wrote:

Thinking aloud: with all these differences per language (Abbreviations and so on), I wonder if it isn’t worth it to consider Textile English but plugable (extends, etc). Then you could have a French addon or Greek addon. Wouldn’t that make things much simpler in the long run?

Sounds good, but I don’t know exactly what that means: pluggable . Let’s say, I am authoring both greek and english at the same time.
Then, when I change rendition or language, would that mean, that TXP will switch over to a localized version of textile.php ? Or would it mean, that additional lang addon files would reside in the same folder for textile and get sourced ?

In the case, of just extending the existing Textile behavior, one would have to alter the regular expression, to match an additional period as well after each concurrrent Capital letter, that are preceeded by a space and a Capital letter and a dot.
In case of a conflict, it could be done, so it matches only those dots, that are appended to the Character codes, that belong the greek and greek extended range. ( I don’t know if that’s reasonable )

The thing though is, that right now, traditional english abbr/acronyms are used as well in greek localized documents. ( There is no real convention how to deal with them. Then those of course do not have the periods and are written out normally with Latin characters, may be quoted sometimes.

Looking at Zem’s proposal above a greek acronym/abbr,

A.B.C.(Some Text) -> initialism

would be matched as Initialism istead.

regards, marios.

Last edited by marios (2007-04-05 19:36:20)

Jeremie · 2007-04-06 02:48:41

Mary wrote:

Thinking aloud: with all these differences per language (Abbreviations and so on), I wonder if it isn’t worth it to consider Textile English but plugable (extends, etc). Then you could have a French addon or Greek addon. Wouldn’t that make things much simpler in the long run?

It would, yes. And that was the road ahead (like, ten years :p) for Dean, before he moved out of TXP.

But I would add a small modification: Textile should be the basics, and the English language should be the first Textile plugin. Because for example, I’m not sure a Textile plugin could say: stop transforming "" into “” but start transforming them into « ». In another words, a language plugin would have to un-Anglicized Textile before applying it’s own rules, and that doesn’t seem efficient to me.

Also, Marios has a point. It would need some mechanism (inside Textile, or inside Textpattern and other Textile softwares, I don’t know where it will be the most efficient) to hot-switch between languages. For a French&English blog of course, pretty basic example, but also inside the same object (like the same article):

For example, if I write an English article, with a long French blockquote in it, it would be nice to have French rules applied inside the bq (like non breaking space before two-sides punctuation, and the like).

It might be easier to do as some might think. In the Textile parsing process, have Textile detect language attribute (the default being the website’s one, and all the way down in the DOM tree to the current pointer) and apply the correct plugin. If the correct plugin is not found, apply either the English one, the default one, or none (prefs dependent).

Yes that would slow Textile, but it should be cached anyway, and that’s for a good cause. We could, if really really really necessary live without the easy HTML markup; for myself I couldn’t live without the typogaphic rewrites (apostrophe, French punctuation with my patched Textile, ellipsis, etc.).

Last edited by Jeremie (2007-04-06 02:51:57)

Mary · 2007-04-06 15:52:22

a language plugin would have to un-Anglicized Textile before applying

No, it wouldn’t with what I am referring to (child classes).

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#13 2007-02-20 03:18:05

Re: [textile] Abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, etc)

#14 2007-02-20 07:40:25

Re: [textile] Abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, etc)

#15 2007-02-20 11:03:04

Re: [textile] Abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, etc)

#16 2007-03-03 15:43:14

Re: [textile] Abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, etc)

#17 2007-03-03 20:29:30

Re: [textile] Abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, etc)

#18 2007-03-24 01:14:05

Re: [textile] Abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, etc)

#19 2007-04-02 10:30:21

Re: [textile] Abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, etc)

#20 2007-04-05 02:47:41

Re: [textile] Abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, etc)

#21 2007-04-05 17:16:30

Re: [textile] Abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, etc)

#22 2007-04-05 19:32:29

Re: [textile] Abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, etc)

#23 2007-04-06 02:48:41

Re: [textile] Abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, etc)

#24 2007-04-06 15:52:22

Re: [textile] Abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, etc)

Board footer