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Re: <abbr> vs <acronym>

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Aug 14, 2003 1:18AM

On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Rob Schumann wrote:

> I have a quick question regarding 'correct' usage
> of the above two tags

Actually, I could write a book on them, and you would still be confused.
Quick as the question may be, no correct answer is quick.

> in particular the way in which they get handled
> by audio browsers.

We shouldn't ignore the majority of users either. The <abbr> and <acronym>
markup seldom helps anyone, but it can confuse users who see odd dotted
underlines (and e.g. take them for links, and wonder what they have done
wrong).

> Examples of use I've seen suggest the following:

Examples given are seriously misleading, including the examples in the
specifications.

> <abbr> to be used for shortenings of phrases/words (e.g. 'Herts' for
> 'Hertfordshire') and for initialisms such as 'HTML'.

By definition, <abbr> means abbreviation. Nothing else is said. This is
far too vague for constructive use.

> <acronym> to be used for the set of initialisms that can themselves be
> pronounced as words, for example, 'NASA'.

That is the established dictionary definition, which seems to have been
unknown to (part of) the people who wrote the HTML specification.
Well, except than an acronym _is_ pronounced as a word. If you read "NASA"
letter by letter, or by expanding it to the full four-word expression, you
are not using it as an acronym. In an ideal world, <acronym>NASA</acronym>
alone would indicate to anyone interested that the string "NASA" is to be
read as a word. But idealism aside, you cannot really know what programs
do with your <acronym> or <abbr>, and things could actually get worse than
without them.

> Within screen readers and the like, does the text bounded by these tags
> ever get read aloud, or only ever the full expansion contained in the
> title attribute?

There is a large number of different programs, and I am pretty sure that
all conceivable behaviors, and some unconceivable too, appear in them.

> If the bounded text does get read aloud then my guess is that <abbr>
> gets read as a pronouncable word (or tries), while <acronym> would get
> spelt out.

I'm afraid that's possible too. It gets things just the wrong way, which
might, on occasion, be what the author meant, of course.

> My question really boils down to how audio access methods handle the
> rendering of these two tags.

They handle them differently (perhaps depending on software settings too),
and audio rendering is just one part of the problem.

The practical problem shouldn't be exaggerated, though. If someone hears
"NASA" as "N-A-S-A", letter by letter, he probably figures out what it
means. But if you use any markup to help audio rendering _and_ you take
seriously the WAI recommendation that (more or less) says that you shall
use title="..." too, then the odds are that someone gets really confused.
Well, maybe many people would still recognize "NASA" when expanded into
"National Aeronautics and Space Administration" (though you would have
difficulties in finding that "full name" on NASA's pages [and not only
because "The nasa.gov site requires that JavaScripts be enabled in your
browser. For instructions, click here"]). But the simple fact is that
quite a many "abbreviations", "acronyms", "initialism", and whatever you
call them are actually the real _names_. Their etymology is rather
immaterial, and sometimes disputed. (For example, the ISO officially
proclaims that "ISO" is not an abbreviation. The name "ECMA" has an
origin as an abbreviation, but the organization tries hard to make that
pure history.)

To summarize, forget <abbr> and <acronym> markup. There's real work to be
done to _explain_ any use of potentially obscure or unknown expression,
whether they are abbreviations, acronyms, initialisms, difficult words,
special symbols, formulas, or something else.

For some more details, check http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/abbr.html

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


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