Re: Brainstorming - abbreviations

Sandy Smith wrote:
> A use case for the semantic difference is writing an application to find 
> all the acronyms in a document and replace them with their called-out 
> equivalents. With <acronym> this is easy. With only <abbr> I have to 
> determine whether or not the content looks like an acronym so I'm not 
> calling out Mr. or Mrs. by mistake.
> 
> If you're going to drop one, I suggest <abbr>, as I have seen far fewer 
> cases of people actually marking up an abbreviation than an acronym, and 
> far more novel acronyms are used in writing than novel abbreviations 
> that would need explaining.

And then what would you do when I asked you to write an application to 
find all the abbreviations and replace then with their called-out 
equivalents?

Further, web content accessibility guidelines do not, to my knowledge, 
make a distinction between needing to "explain" abbreviations that are 
"novel" versus all.

-- 
Bill Mason
Accessible Internet
w3c@accessibleinter.net
http://accessibleinter.net/

Received on Thursday, 15 March 2007 20:03:35 UTC