Re: Abbreviations and Acronyms: [techs] Latest HTML Techniques Draft

As a linguist I think that since all acronyms are "abbreviations" in the
generic sense of the term, but that not all abbreviations are acronyms in any
sense, it is not wrong to call the whole lot abbreviations and put them in an
element called "abbr".

As a web professional I think it is not wrong to use "accortado" as the
element name either.

I do think there is value in looking at the ruby element [1], introduced in
XHTML 1.1 and currently included in XHTML 2, which is designed to provide the
kind of expansion that we want for abbreviations of various kinds, and which
allows simple styling to give us the different choices we would like to have
for presenting these things. If there is some reason not to use ruby itself,
then I think its structure is still a very good model for any new element
that does what we want.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-ruby-20010531/

Cheers

Chaals

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Patrizia Bertini wrote:

>
>Il giorno 10/dic/03, alle 22:27, John M Slatin ha scritto:
>
>>
>
>> abbr title="By the way">BTW</abbr>, I wonder how the linguists feel
>> about making acronym and abbreviation synonymous?
>>
>> John
>>
>
>Not very well in fact... as a Linguist, i don't agree in this
>assimilation. one thing is an acronym, an other thing is an
>abbreviation.
>one way to joint these two element would to find out a new way to
>express them like an element like <expand text>, in these case, if we
>talk about expanding and / or explain an abbreviation and acronym i
>think it could be ok, but we can't call an acronym as an abbreviation.
>an LTD.  is not like an Inc. for instance and the meaning that these
>two words express are pretty different.
>
>is formally wrong to use only the abbr elemt, better to find out a
>third way IMVHO.
>
>M2p -- pat
>
>

Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409 134 136
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Received on Friday, 12 December 2003 09:38:23 UTC