See Also: HTML is not an acronym... by Craig Saila.

Some more questions...

If USA is an acronym, should it be USOA (United States Of America)?

Can you have a one letter acronym?

Can you have a one letter abbreviation?

Are acronyms and abbreviations mutually exclusive sets?

Are there minimum/maximum lengths for acronyms and abbr?

Are the rules different in different countries?

Can there ever be a universal standard, and does it matter?

Posted by: Mac on April 24, 2003 04:37 AM

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What about laser: light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, scuba,radar, BASIC or COBOL, Disney's Epcot® center? Should I really have to think about marking these up at? (BTW, Epcot = Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow)

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci211560,00.html puts it well:

"The Webster's definition does raise a question (and begs one, too). Is the "word" an acronym forms a real, already existing word, or intended to be accepted as a new "word," or just something easily pronounceable? If the first case, then "snafu" and "radar" really aren't acronyms. If the second or third case, they are. However, since any initialism can be thought of as a word and certainly has to be pronounceable so you can say it out loud, one could argue that any initialism is an acronym. We don't think anyone has looked at this issue squarely (and we're not planning to ourselves, but just wanted to demonstrate the ambiguous kind of world we live in...which is why most people frankly don't care whether an acronym is a word or not)."

This is the kind of discussion which higlights two things: the piddling things geeks (markup variety) think about, and the faulty notion that anything more meaningful than P can be marked up correctly.

Posted by: on April 24, 2003 07:37 AM

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I suspect those creating the HTML standard didn't think about it very much and possibly thought of acronyms as being initialisms, so that the acronym tag would be for anything made up of initial letters while abbr would cover other abbreviations.

Internet Explorer doesn't support abbr, so to fully support it you either have to stick with acronym for everything or use JavaScript to replace abbr with acronym in IE.

I don't think it's 'faulty' to use more meaningful markup. Using the correct tags for things like headings, block quotes, lists, etc. makes a big difference in terms of accessibility and future-proofing, and even using more obscure tags such as cite, ins, del, and code adds to the richness of a page's information.

Posted by: Matt Round on April 24, 2003 08:18 AM

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Yeah Matt, especially when the Hn tags, IMG tags etc. are being done away with in XHTML 2.0

I don't see much "future-proofing" there at all. Oops, there goes your semantic meaning.

Sure, you could simply stick to xhtml 1.1, but then there goes the "future proofing" argument - that sticking to today's standards means compatibility with future standards.

Posted by: MadMan on April 24, 2003 08:42 AM

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You know, I think about web standards and I wonder at how non-standard they are. It was HTML 3.2 then 4.0 then XHTML 1.1, then 2.0. All in the span of four years or so. Where's the standard if it's always changing?

Can you imagine what it would be like if oil refineries updated their "standard" for unleaded gasoline as frequently? I can take my 1992 car and run it on the same gasoline as my 2003 car. The twisted pair my land line phone uses is basically the same as it was 40 years ago. The technology surrounding it is vastly different, but the standard remains.

I see the reasoning as you're improving on something to make it better. But if you're constantly reworking code to meet the ever-changing standards, then is it really a standard?

Posted by: Darin on April 24, 2003 10:42 AM

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Every tech statndard will evolve, like jargon, to maintain a barrier to the unwashed masses. Besides it takes ten years or more to get a good, stable Standard 1.0, no matter how many versions it takes. So here's looking toward HTML 7.2 and CSS 5.

BTW, you can get abbr to work using SPAN. Doesn't make it any less dumb, but just saying.

Posted by: on April 24, 2003 12:28 PM

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I'd say that you can just use the abbr tag for acronyms and for abbreviations (or you could, if IE supported it fully). The reason for this is that acronyms are simply a specific kind of abbreviation. The definitions in the linked article even cite "USMC" (for the U.S. Marine Corps) as an example of an abbreviation, when it's obviously more specifically an acronym.

Posted by: Matt on April 24, 2003 02:06 PM

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"Yeah Matt, especially when the Hn tags, IMG tags etc. are being done away with in XHTML 2.0
I don't see much "future-proofing" there at all. Oops, there goes your semantic meaning."

XHTML 2 is, intentionally, taking a 'clean slate' approach so no, XHTML 1.x content won't inherently be XHTML 2 compatible. But people are no more wasting their time adopting XHTML 1.x now than those who moved from plain text to HTML 2 several years ago.

Which type of content would you rather try to move to another format or to a swanky new template design: 'tag soup' markup, or clean XHTML with appropriate use of structural tags?
I deal with getting content in and out of sites all the time. Good markup can be easily manipulated and restyled, whereas broken markup has no more value than plain text and so has to either be reworked at great expense or thrown out.

Rigorously adhering to standards isn't always worthwhile, but it's certainly worth thinking about what format will best preserve the value of your content.

Posted by: Matt Round on April 24, 2003 03:12 PM

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Not a single post smartly using a dozen different acronyms and abbreviations. Ya'll are nerds.

Posted by: Pee Chee Jock on April 26, 2003 02:32 PM

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cool

Posted by: keith knutsson on April 27, 2003 07:47 PM

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