Why is it still "ACRONYM"?

Seeing what has (justly) happened to ACRONYM in the latest
Cougar draft, I'm wondering whether there's still a reason
not to replace it by something more general. The first draft
had an easy rule:

| Acronyms are generally spoken by pronouncing the individual
| letters separately.

Okay, that's not generally true for abbreviations, so I see
why the element was introduced as something different from
the old ABBREV. Unfortunately, though, it isn't generally
true for acronyms either, therefore the current version has
this:

| Note that some acronyms are pronounced letter-by-letter
| (such as "IRS" or "BBC"); others are pronounced as words
| (such as "NATO" or "UNESCO"; still others are spelled out by
| some people and pronounced as words by other people ("URL",
| "SQL"). Authors should use style sheets to specify how a
| specific acronym is to be pronounced.

So there's no general pronunciation rule any longer - why is
there still the restriction to acronyms then at all? Is there
any advantage in having markup for acronyms, but not for
other abbreviations?

Holger

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      |  |/|/  Wahlen  //  http://www.ph-cip.uni-koeln.de/~wahlen/

Received on Monday, 29 September 1997 19:48:15 UTC