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Re: ABBR vs. just spelling it out.

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Mar 20, 2006 2:40PM

On Mon, 20 Mar 2006, Austin, Darrel wrote:

> 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.

The correct concise answer is "No", but the problem is that the W3C
recommendations say "Yes" - for _all_ abbreviations! See
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#gl-abbreviated-and-foreign

(Note that the page http://www.w3.org/WAI/ uses abbreviations without
<abbr> markup, though.)

For reasons to avoid <abbr>, see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/abbr.html
Note that "support" to <abbr> in IE 7 will be one more reason
_not_ to use <abbr>.

> <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...

Browsers that "support" <abbr> markup typically display a dotted line
below the abbreviation. This is confusing, since it makes it look like a
link and it draws attention and raises questions, thereby making smooth
reading harder.

Besides, it is highly debatable whether "HTML" is really an abbreviation
except by origin. An abbreviation proper is something that can be replaced
by its expansion (the unabbreviated expression) without changing the
meaning. However, saying that something is a HyperText Markup Language
document is not equivalent to calling it an HTML document. The string
"HTML" is the name of a particular hypertext markup language - and it is
far better know than the "expansion".

> 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...

Right. Or alternatively "HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is used...",
but this is a matter of style.

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