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ABBR vs. just spelling it out.

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From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Mar 20, 2006 12:50PM

As a government agency, we use a lot of abbreviations. Authors are
asking if they should use ABBR tags or not and I didn't have a concise
answer.

It seems like there are two viable options:

Use abbr tags:

<abbr title="Hypertext Markup Language">HTML</abbr> is use to markup the
content of a page so a web browser can render it. HTML was invented...

Just spell it out:

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is use to markup the content of a page
so a web browser can render it. HTML was invented...

The latter would seem to be more accessible for screen readers as
TITLEs, IIRC, aren't often read by the screen reader by default.

In addition, it wouldn't require anyone to mouse over the item to see
the full text, either.

Thoughts?

-Darrel