Re: Abbreviations and Acronyms: [techs] Latest HTML Techniques Draft

On Dec 24, 2003, at 10:01 AM, Geoff Deering wrote:
<abbr title="By the way">BTW</abbr>, I wonder how the linguists feel
>> about making acronym and abbreviation synonymous?
>
> I'm left scratching my head at times wondering what is going on with 
> decisions such as these.  I don't understand the logic behind this at 
> all.  For an organisation that wants to support a semantically rich 
> web I can't see it as a step forward, and for all those who put a lot 
> of time into marking up their documents in a meaningful way, what does 
> it say to them?

So far, I have yet to hear a good argument for the status quo. As it 
is, acronyms and abbreviations are a distinction without much 
difference, and even the difference is unclear and/or actively debated 
by its implementers. If it's not reliably implementable or 
understandable in the first place, it's a poor division to make, 
semantically speaking. So I'm for a single element in XHTML 2, in the 
interest of good semantics. XHTML 2 can say that abbr represents 
acronyms, abbreviations, initialisms, symbols, legends, whatever. I 
don't know why it needs to be more precise than that. The goal is to 
allow for expansion of shorthand expressions. What's the value in 
splitting hairs here?

-
m