Re: abbr and acronym

Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
> I'm having a brain-freeze at the moment, but: are there any other 
> cases in HTML where we have a generic and a specific element, where 
> the specific is a subset of the generic?
You could argue that all inline semantic elements are "refinements" of 
<span>. You could perhaps argue that <strong> is a refinement of <em>.
> I'll throw another question in: are acronyms language-specific? i.e. 
> is the idea of "needs to be pronounceable" dependent on the language?
The word "acronym" is English, so I think the English definition would 
apply. For what it's worth, the German "Akronym" has the same meaning. 
(Big surprise.)
However, I'm pretty sure (although I can't come up with any right now) 
that there are some abbreviations that are acronyms in German 
(pronounced as a word) and just abbreviations in English (spelled out). 
So whether a specific abbreviation is an acronym might depend on the 
context language.

Sebastian Redl

Received on Monday, 26 March 2007 15:08:38 UTC