RE: abbr, acronym and working examples

Part of the confusion regarding the difference in the semantics of <abbr>
and <acronym> comes I feel from the fact that we have two elements (and two
CSS attributes) when three is really needed, at least as far as the CSS
attributes go.

Consider the following:

HTML - I would say "haitch tee em el" (if you don't speak en-IE you might
say "aitch").

NATO - I would say "nato".

etc. - I would say "et cetera" (or possibly translate to "and so on").

To reflect natural usage we therefore need to add "expanded" or similar to
the possible values of speak, and perhaps it would be worth having reflected
this in HTML elements as well.

We could possibly do something to make use of attr(title) as things stand,
but that would probably be kludgy at best.

Received on Wednesday, 6 November 2002 08:07:43 UTC