acronym AND abbr ?Re: New tool

This has been discussed several times over the last few years, and is 
relevant to ongoing development of XHTML 2.

As well as the apparent presentational aspect of the term (this is 
tricky - the pronunciation varies according to many factors) there are 
differences between what are acronyms and what are abreviations, albeit 
ones which are fairly subtle in some cases. If we were creating markup 
designed for serious linguists (like the TEI people) then it would make 
sense to have two (or more) element types. However I believe that we 
should have one way of pointing out that the tem being used is standing 
in for something that can b rendered as a larger term (such as UN for 
Unitedd Nations).

There The real value for this is going to be in processing the 
information we find for clues such as how to pronounce it. Some people 
will prefer to hear "U N", others "United Nations", others whatever the 
author decided to put there.are techniques around for identifying a term 
in a document and relating it to a known term - so that UN, ONU, United 
Nations, can all be linked to some meaningful thing, and we can find 
statements about ho it can be pronounced, or make our own about how we 
would like to hear it. (Or for that matter the icon we would like put 
into the page we are skimming, or the musical mouseover cue...)

This is one of the things the semantic web is about; being explicit 
about meaning in a way that we can process allows us to provide more 
useful, helpful ways of presenting the information to people.

cheers

Chaals

David Woolley wrote:

>><acronym></acronym> and <abbr></abbr> both perform the same function,
>>that is, they expand and explain the meaning of a term.  The question
>>    
>>
>
>The difference is that acronym indicates that an aural rendering should
>try to pronounce the word, whereas abbr indicates that it should spell
>it out (or use the title attribute).
>
>  
>

Received on Wednesday, 23 April 2003 21:23:39 UTC