RE: proper use of abbr and acronym

At 7:33 PM -0800 11/17/00, Charles F. Munat wrote:
>Sean B. Palmer wrote:
>"In specific, it appears to me that XUL is an acronym, rather than an
>abbreviation."
>Reply:
>Only if it is pronounced as a word ("zuhl"), rather than spelled out. An
>acronym is a word formed from the first letter or first few letters of other
>words. For example, RaDAR from RAdio Detecting And Ranging or CReEP from
>Committee to RE-Elect the President (remember that one?).
>So XML, HTML, W3C, XHTML, etc. are abbreviations, not acronyms.

Just to note, we've been around this issue several times and the official
W3C specifications are _not_ consistent on this point.  At the current
time it's probably best to consider <abbr> and <acronym> to be effectively
equivalent tags which both convey "this is a shortened form of some
other words" and ignore any semantic distinctions between the two.

(Specific qualities such as "how do you pronounce it?" are considered
presentational and may be found in CSS.)

At this point, it's not really worth worrying about.  They can be used
equivalently for the most part (although there is one which is slightly
better supported -- <abbr> I think?) and Ruby provides a superior
example on how to do textual alternatives/replacements/expansions for
text anyway.

--Kynn
-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Saturday, 18 November 2000 02:27:15 UTC