Re: Acronyms and Abbreviations

John Whelan wrote:
> 
> My guess, based mostly on the fact that 1) ACRONYM is better supported
> by browsers and 2) "abbreviation" is a more generic term, is that
> ACRONYM was invented first as a proprietary extension with the intent
> of marking up presentational ideas like putting acronyms in small
> caps, and when the W3C incorporated it into HTML4, they decided that
> its use to provide expansions to acronyms (via the TITLE attribute)
> also applied to more general abbreviations, whence the ABBR element.
> Starting from scratch, I at least would have only defined ABBR, as
> many people consider acronyms (a language-dependent concept anyway)
> to be a subset of abbreviations.
> 
> Is this close to the truth?

I don't think so.  HTML 3.0 had both an ACRONYM and ABBREV element
before browsers had implemented either.  See
<http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/logical.html>.

-- 
Liam Quinn
A Real Validator for Windows, http://arealvalidator.com
Web Design Group, http://www.htmlhelp.com

Received on Friday, 22 October 1999 08:44:33 UTC