Re: Brainstorming - abbreviations

On Mar 15, 2007, at 4:03 PM, Bill Mason wrote:

> 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?

If we have both <acronym> and <abbr>, it's trivial. If we have only  
<acronym>, well, I'm betting you'll ask me to do this less often than  
the reverse, as it is not customary to call out Mr. (Mister) in  
English or Ing. (inżynier) in Polish. I'd prefer to keep both, but if  
one has to go, my vote is <abbr>.

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

Nor was I arguing that they did; I merely pointed out that it is  
customary to have content creation guidelines in an organization that  
require the callout of any acronym used for the first time in a  
document, but rare to have the reverse. Not all semantic meaning is  
for accessibility.

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