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Re: Acronym/Abbreviation best practice

for

From: Simius Puer
Date: Mar 13, 2009 9:40AM

None at all Dan. Not unless you have so many abbreviations that the
additional mark-up suddenly blows your document-weight out of the water
(which is frankly unlikely).

What seems to be being overlooked here is that the problem is not one of
just sighted users vs those using assistive technologies such as Jaws.
Other people who need these explainations include: those with disabilities
such as dyslexia, cognitive disabilities such as dementia, and other users
including children, the elderly, and foreign language learners. Not having
*every *tag marked up in some way affects these users.

I think the article you are referring to is "The Accessibility Hat Trick:
Getting Abbreviations Right" which can be read here:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/hattrick/ and covers all the aspects that
have been covered in this debate so far. Most importantly *it deals with
the accessibility vs visual aesthetics debate* which seems to be the crunch
point that most people have an issue with. So, you can achieve both with a
little work - pls refer to the article.

Oh, and I totally forgot to mention in my last post that XHTML 2 also drops
the <acronym> tag in favor of the <abbr> one alone
[1<http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-text.html#sec_9.1.>;]
so no more confusion there!

And before I forget...a big happy birthday to the WWW (or should that be
<abbr title"World Wide Web">WWW</abbr>), 20 today!

Have a great weekend everyone.