Athel Cornish-Bowden
Guest
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| Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2004 2:31 pm
Post subject: Re: "Mr." an acronym? |
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mhamm@artsci.wustl.edu (Michael Hamm) wrote in message news:<cmok4u$8g8$1@newsreader.wustl.edu>...
| Quote: | Today, Athel Cornish-Bowden <athel@ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr> abed:
vagueness about the difference between acronyms and abbreviations is
increasingly widespread, and I doubt if it will survive another
generation. The great stylists who designed the web browser Internet
Explorer decided that they would recognize the tag <acronym> but would
ignore the W3C's recommended <abbr>, so if you want to tag an
abbreviation so that it will be detected as such by Internet Explorer
you have to enclose it in <acronym title=" ... "> ... </acronym> tags. I
resisted this for a long time, but eventually gave in, thinking it was
more important to give readers the information they might want than to
insist on correct use of terms.
I don't agree that your long-term resistance was an insistence on the
correct use of terms. Although you may have been insisting on using
acronym> strictly for acronyms and <abbr> strictly for abbreviations,
that does not mean that you were insisting on the correct use of <acronym
and of <abbr>. <Acronym> and <abbr> were defined in HTML4 respectively as
indicating acronyms and abbreviations, but, as has been discussed
elsewhere (i.e., not on aue), the W3C was very unclear about the
difference between the two elements. See, e.g.,
URL:http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1999Oct/0046.html>,
URL:http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1999Oct/0097.html>,
URL:http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1999Oct/0099.html>,
URL:http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1999Oct/0148.html>,
URL:http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/abbr.html#markup>, and/or
URL:http://google.com/groups?th=e32c50200f290b01>.
You are right about all this. As you say, the matter has been |
extensively discussed on HTML and other web-related news groups, and
is more complicated than I implied. Most of the more informed people
who have contributed to that discussion have agreed that the W3C was
itself muddled and gave muddled definitions in the first place. All of
which, however, goes to support the idea that confusion between
acronyms and abbreviations is widespread and that trying to maintain
the distinction is likely to be a lost cause.
athel
--
Athel Cornish-Bowden
athel@ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr
http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/homepage.htm |
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