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RE: Acronyms and abbreviations

for

From: Jukka Korpela
Date: Apr 1, 2002 11:15PM

Sam Buchanan wrote:

> Ineke van der Maat wrote:
> > I don't know why the difference between an acronym and an
> > abbreviation is so difficult to understand... I saw that the W3C
> > even does not understand it completely.. ..
>
> Probably because people often think of abbreviations as being
> something like "lbs." or "St." I know I do.

The string "St." is a common abbreviation in English, and could stand for
"Street" or "Saint" (or perhaps something else). Sometimes <abbr> markup
could be useful just for disambiguation, since people with cognitive
disabilities may have difficulties in using the context to deduce which of
the expansions applies.

But is "lbs" an abbreviation? Do you give adequate metainformation if you
write <abbr title="pounds">lbs</abbr>? Consider what that tells to a naive
user. (And in accessibility we care about naive users too, don't we?)
Naturally he won't normally see the markup directly or think about its
defined meaning, but let's assume that he uses a user agent that honestly
and informatively tries to tell the user about the document, as described by
the author in the markup.

Let's assume that when the user clicks on the string "lbs", which is
indicated by the browser (e.g. by some special underline or background
color) as having some extra information attached to it. A user-friendly way
to convey the defined meaning of the markup would be to say or display
"'lbs' is an abbreviation for 'pounds'", naturally reading "lbs" letter by
letter when speaking.

WWWebster says about the word "abbreviation":
1 : the act or result of abbreviating : ABRIDGMENT
2 : a shortened form of a written word or phrase used in place of the whole
<amt is an abbreviation for amount>

Now our hypothetical user, assuming he knows the word "abbreviation" in
roughly that meaning, starts wonderig: How come? How do get "lbs" from
"pounds" by shortening it? I don't see any "l" or "b" in "pounds". I'm
puzzled. Is there a secret message? Is there a typo somewhere? What does
"lbs" _really_ mean?

Thus, my suggestion is:
- use <abbr> for true abbreviations only: an abbreviation is formed
from an expression by omitting letters (and possibly adding
punctuation like ".")
- use <acronym> for pronounceable words that have originally been
formed from initial letters of words (and thus have at least
originally been abbreviations)
- otherwise, to associate advisory titles with expressions, use
some other markup, which often means <span>, the semantics-free
text container element.

--
Jukka Korpela
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