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

There was a great deal of debate on this topic when ACRONYM and ABBR
where developed.

These terms have differeing meanings in different countries (including
US and UK; in addition I understand there are some other differences in
, for example, the Dutch language).

Also whether the terms themselves are spoken as words or the individual
letters are spoken varies not only across different countires, but also
within countries e.g. FAQ (fack or EFF-AY-QUEUE), VRML (vermel or
VEE-R-EM-EL), URL is sometimes pronounced as earl (although this usage
may have died out), etc.

I seems to be that it is difficult for author to marup this up correctly
as the usage will be dependent on the user's cultural environment (in a
more difficult way than, say, US versus UK diffre4ences in spelling,
which is consistent).

Brian

> 
> >  1970; english. acronym  word composed with Initials or syllabs or
>  
> > <ABBR title="World Wide Web">WWW</ABBR>
> > 
> > is wrong :) WWW is Acronym, not abbr...
> 
> No, because WWW is not a word, as it is not pronounceable in English.
> 
> As you may be gathering, there are variations across Europe 
> in the way these terms are defined and also, in England, the 
> general public and popular press tend to treat acronym and 
> abbreviation as interchangeable, in the same way as they 
> treat virus and bacteria as interchangeable.
> 
> This is a fairly common repeat topic on these lists.
> 
>

Received on Friday, 12 December 2003 05:06:14 UTC