- From: Bailey, Bruce <Bruce_Bailey@ed.gov>
- Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2001 10:10:57 -0500
- To: "'w3c-wai-ig@w3.org'" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>, "'sean@mysterylights.com'" <sean@mysterylights.com>
- Cc: "'kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com'" <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>
Okay, I'm confused! The result of one of those "thousand times before" discussion lead me quite clearly to understand that, in actual practice, the ONLY difference between ABBR and ACRONYM is that the latter should be read (mentally, or out loud) as a word and that the former should be spelled out. The problem with Sean's example is that he should use: <acronym>EARL</acronym> uses <abbr>URL</abbr>s. To summarize the rest of the last long discussion on this topic: (1) The denotative distinction between an acronym and abbreviation is not clear. (2) The distinction gets more muddled when one considers other languages. (3) The only reasonably approach in HTML is to treat one as a "word" and the other as "spell out" and not to otherwise sweat the detail. (4) Other concise attempts at distinguishing between the two (like one uses periods, the other doesn't) went down in flames. (5) IE will expand (via mouse-over pop-up) a title attribute in ABBR but not ACRONYM. (Or was that the other way around? I love consistent browser behavior.) But who here codes to idiosyncratic browser behavior?
Received on Monday, 5 February 2001 10:13:13 UTC