Re: Brainstorming - abbreviations

On 15 Mar 2007, at 15:55, Colin Lieberman wrote:

> I know some folks oppose the xhtml 2 plan to get rid of <acronym>,  
> but are two tags really necessary?
>
> I think more useful would be an attribute to <abbr> that indicates  
> to user agents whether the abbreviation is meant to be spoken as  
> initials or as a word. There could be an additional optional  
> attribute for some other pronunciation:
>
> <abbr title="World Wide Web Consortium" type="initial">W3C</abbr>
>
> <abbr title="Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell  
> Computers and Humans Apart" type="word">CAPCHA</abbr>
>
> <abbr title="Structured Query Language" type="custom"  
> pronounce="sequel">SQL</abbr>

Surely this is truly an aural CSS issue, not an HTML one? We already  
have the "speak" property, and the "spell-out" value reads it how  
letter by letter.

I do, however, agree that there is little point in having <abbr> and  
<acronym> – the difference between the two isn't completely clear,  
and is often got wrong. UAs for the sake of backwards compatibility  
should support both, but I see little reason in retaining this  
unclarity in a future spec.

- Geoffrey Sneddon

Received on Friday, 16 March 2007 08:37:33 UTC