[thesite] Eliminating jargon in articles

[Madhu Menon]

Hi all.

Somebody has pointed out that it's often hard to satisfy all categories of 
readers in an article. While the advanced developers will know what 
something like SKU means, newbies probably won't. Yet, sometimes you have 
to use abbreviations and acronyms in articles.

What I'd like to do to partially fix the problem is to accept <ABBR> as 
legal HTML for articles. Then, whenever an abbreviation or acronym is used, 
we just add the <ABBR> tag to them. We can also style them so they have, 
say, a dotted underline. When someone hovers their mouse on them, it's 
explained to them. Simple.

So, instead of a sentence like:

Not all browsers support all standards laid out by the W3C

you'd have:

Not all browsers support all standards laid out by the <abbr title="World 
Wide Web consortium">W3C</abbr>

While technically, you should <abbr> for abbreviations and <acronym> for 
acronyms, we could probably do with either one of them.

What do you think?

Madhu
PS: An acronym is an abbreviation that is pronounced as a word. So NASA is 
an acronym, while CNN is an abbreviation. Words like SQL and URL can be 
either.

<<<   *   >>>
Madhu Menon
User Experience Consultant
e-mail: webguru at vsnl.net