Re: How would recursive acronyms be marked up?

On Fri, Dec 13, 2002 at 10:10:15PM -0500, Brant Langer Gurganus wrote:
| How would GNU be marked up (title attribute) since it is a recursive 
| acronym?
| GNU's not UNIX

What a nasty question! But how would it be done in text/plain??? Normally 
for an abbreviation in text/plain, you'd write something like this:

	John worked for UNICEF (The United Nations' Children's
	Fund) as an accountant.

So if we try to write up a recursive acronym:

	In his work at UNICEF, John uses a lot of software that
	runs on the GNU (GNU's (GNU's (...) not UNIX) not UNIX)
	operating system.

Doesn't quite work you see! The problem is not with (X)HTML, but with 
trying to expand a recursive acronym at all!

I'd suggest using:

<abbr title="GNU's Not UNIX">GNU</abbr> and trust the reader to be able to 
figure out the meaning of the GNU in the title attribute, given that 
you've explained what GNU stands for.

-- 
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
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