Re: abbr and acronym

On Mon, 26 Mar 2007, Tina Holmboe wrote:

>  However, unless we actually /structurally/ differentiate between
>  an acronym and an abbreviation there is no way that any browser can
>  render them differently, aurally or otherwise.

Why would that matter? An acronym is, by definition, a word. Why would you 
need to specify that a word be rendered as a word? You might say that it 
might be written in uppercase, e.g. "NATO", but so might any word, when 
PEOPLE JUST SHOUT. In any case, if you want to indicate that a string be 
read as a word and not letter by letter or as an expanded to something, 
then this is is logically independent of its being or not being an 
acronym.

An acronym is a word with a known (or assumed) etymology consisting of 
initial letters of words. Why would this matter, from the HTML 
perspective, any more than any other etymology?

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Monday, 26 March 2007 17:21:57 UTC