With all due respect Michael, I often read -- and appreciate -- your
reasoned comments on the evolution of HTML 3.0, but here I think you
aren't seeing the forest from the trees...
The rendering of ACRONYM is of the most minor importance compared to
its usefulness in generating indicies for automatic searches and for
processing by knobots.
What is the use of a search engine that doesn't turn up documents
discussing "MIT" when you ask for a list of all pertinent information
relating to the Massachussetts Institute of Technology? Or such
software that gives you heaps of info on the Ministry of Industry
and Technology (of Montenegro???) when you were interested in the
above mentioned engineering school?
At this point, the rendering of "MIT" because insignificant... since
you probably won't be looking at the right info anyway.
> These tags might be useful for search engines too, if someone wanted to search
> for all the acronyms or authors or what have you in a search space.
It's not a question of "too", or "incidentally". This is the
principal raison-d'etre for this tag. Let's not forget that.
Someday soon, I'm not going to have a 28.8kb/s network connection,
but an ISDN PRI (2.048 or 1.536 Mb/s) connection to my home, not
to speak of ATM or networking of the cable-TV company's fibre.
Most of the HTML that will go through my workstation will pass
through it much faster than I can read... rather it will be
"digested" by my search engines which will read it for me while
I do other things.
Say, why doesn't the ENTITY for DFN appear in the HTML 3.0 DTD? I
was just perusing it to verify some of Ping's comments and couldn't
find it...
-Philip