- From: John Whelan <whelan@itp.unibe.ch>
- Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 06:22:01 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-html@w3.org
- Cc: ngulati@scu.edu.au
>> why have both acronym and abbreviation tags? >> Why have either? > I'm scared. No-one has an answer. My guess, based mostly on the fact that 1) ACRONYM is better supported by browsers and 2) "abbreviation" is a more generic term, is that ACRONYM was invented first as a proprietary extension with the intent of marking up presentational ideas like putting acronyms in small caps, and when the W3C incorporated it into HTML4, they decided that its use to provide expansions to acronyms (via the TITLE attribute) also applied to more general abbreviations, whence the ABBR element. Starting from scratch, I at least would have only defined ABBR, as many people consider acronyms (a language-dependent concept anyway) to be a subset of abbreviations. Is this close to the truth? John T. Whelan whelan@iname.com http://www.slack.net/~whelan/
Received on Friday, 22 October 1999 06:36:48 UTC