[editorial] acronym/abbreviation mixup in AERT

[I assume this must have come up before, but I didn't find a resolution on
the 'issues' list so I am filing it now.]

Where the AERT discusses acronyms and abbreviations, it has the "potential
_foo_" cases backwards.  If the document is going to make a distinction
between these terms, even in heuristic introductory prose, please make a
plausible distinction.  I am not going to go so far as to say there is one
"right" distinction, but one can and should get within the competitive range.

Ref:

 Techniques For Accessibility Evaluation And Repair Tools
 http://www.w3.org/TR/AERT

Quote:

   Potential abbreviation:
     * Any word greater than 2 characters that is all capital letters

   Potential acronym:
     * Any word that starts with a capital letter, contains lower case
       characters and ends with a period.

These are backwards.  'Mlle.' as used in French is an abbreviation, not an
acronym, and NATO is an acronym (special case of abbreviation).  Acronyms
should be recognized as a distinguished subcategory of abbreviations, not
(in natural language usage) as a separate category outside the category of
abbreviations.

See also 
<http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=acronym>
.

Yes, it is appropriate to give examples and yes, the way the actual rule is
handled (it applies to both classes of text tokens without distinction) is
done right already.  The rule is fine.  There is a mislocution in the
explanatory examples.  The existing "potential _foo_" example detection
rules are plausible if you interchange 'acronym' and 'abbreviation,'
although they do suffer from being biased toward English or a language
group of Western European languages which have abbreviation practices
(including acronymization) similar to what appears in English.

Maybe it would be good to add a YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary -- an acronymic
abbreviation from the 'traditional Internet' subculture) note to the effect
that the rules for detecting suspected abbreviations (or acronyms) will, in
general, be different for different natural languages.

Al

Received on Saturday, 18 November 2000 09:57:27 UTC