[manual] Acronyms and initialisms

Hi,

   Section 11.5 requires TRs to spell out acronyms and initialisms in
their first occurrence. An example given is

  "Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)" 

WCAG wants the same thing, but wants authors to use the title attribute
for the expansion, an example given is

  <P>Welcome to the <ACRONYM title="World Wide Web">WWW</ACRONYM>!

Combining these two requirements, one would end up with something like

  <p><acronym title='North Atlantic Treaty Organisation'>NATO</acronym>
  (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation)</p>

or the other way round

  <p>North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (<acronym title='North Atlantic
  Treaty Organisation'>NATO</acronym>)</p>

This seems to be a bit overambitious. Is "spell out" satisfied with a
title attribute? In general, I prefer the style as in the IETF example,
i.e. acronym follows expansion, do I still need to use the title
attribute in this case? Further, given a document on XML, does the
specification need to use the <acronym> [1] element each time the string
'XML' occurs and should it always expand the initialism in the title
attribute?

[1] XML is an initialism, not an acronym...

regards,
-- 
Björn Höhrmann { mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de } http://www.bjoernsworld.de
am Badedeich 7 } Telefon: +49(0)4667/981028 { http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
25899 Dagebüll { PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 } http://www.learn.to/quote/

Received on Friday, 28 December 2001 23:20:55 UTC