- From: Matthew Raymond <mattraymond@earthlink.net>
- Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 21:37:36 -0400
- To: Doug Jones <doug_b_jones@mac.com>
- CC: HTML WG Public List <public-html@w3.org>
Doug Jones wrote: >> Unfortunately, the definition of initialism causes things to be messy. >> That an initialism may be an acronym is not part of the primary >> definition. If you see the word "PNG", you might way "ping" while I would say "P-N-G". From the perspective of a neutral party, the word is both an initialism and and acronym at the same time. >> I amend my example of abbreviation to exclude WWW and UK; these are >> initiailsms. However, if we do not separate out initialisms, I believe >> they best belong in the abbreviation camp since they do not form words. I disagree. Whether or not something is an acronym or an initialism is largely a matter of personal preference, and in some cases (like "SQL") its a matter of context. It doesn't make sense to treat these separately when the difference between the two is a matter of aural presentation for which there may be a widespread difference of opinion. Markup should not be a tool for waging pronunciation wars. >> Also, an abbreviation is customarily expanded upon reading. Perhaps an >> initialism is read by character. It wouldn't be harmful to read out acronyms by letter. In fact, with all the annoying quasi-acronyms flying around (XUL, XAML, PNG, MNG, et cetera), I'd prefer it.
Received on Friday, 30 March 2007 01:36:21 UTC