Rodent Regatta

Yesterday, I had an opportunity to be semantic or use good semantics or be a member of the semantic web – whatever. I wrote an entry using the term RFID. I surrounded it with [acronym][/acronym] tags as I had read you’re supposed to if you’re worried about such things as well-formed, validating, semantic markup.

However, the rendered version of my entry did nothing with those tags. I had seen them used here, and found a small question mark appeared over the acronym which was underlined with a dashed underline. I was viewing the page with IE 6.0. Yet, when I viewed my own page in the same browser, nada. Still digging for the answer to this one. My hunches are that this has something to do with either the page encoding or the CSS. Those are only hunches. One interesting twist to this is that the home page shows the dashed underlines, while the entry viewed alone using its permalink does not show the dashed underlines. This makes me suspect CSS is at work on the home page, but not on the individual entry pages. Again, just a hunch.

I use a lot of contractions when I write and speak. I have just learned that if I’m going to be well-formed, validating and semantic (or whatever), I must start typing these characters (without the hyphens) “&-#8-2-1-7;”anywhere that I need an apostrophe (aka right single quotation mark).

Wow, that is a lot to type. It will restrict my ability to write the way I speak. I will now say things without contractions to avoid putting seven characters here when I previously used only one. Something tells me that others are writing their Movable Type entries in another tool and pasting them into the Movable Type text entry box for posting. Even the best of the best don’t (oops, do not) really want to type 7 characters where they once typed one.

Am I supposed to do this same encoding with commas, periods and hyphens? I just viewed source over at Zeldman’s and found that he is not encoding those three. However, there are plenty of ”right single quotation marks” or apostrophes! Something tells me I’ll be learning TopStyle Pro in the very near future.

• * * UPDATE * * * I just viewed a couple of pages in Opera. Same effect. The home page renders acronyms with a dashed underline and displays a question mark when you hover over the acronym. On the entry page (permalink) alone, no dashed underlines show up.

Question: Do users of Opera have it set to ”Identify as MSIE 6.0?” Or, do you have it set (in preferences) to ”Identify as Opera?”