[thelist] When an Acronym is not an Acronym

Maximillian Schwanekamp lists at neptunewebworks.com
Wed Jun 29 12:39:21 CDT 2005


Chris Hayes wrote:
> Some content acronyms don't actually stand for anything, but need to be
> spelt out.

Got an example?  That's sorta contradictory...  Some abbreviations are
not acronyms, though.

> So say the acronym is BOB.  I don't want a screen reader to say "bob" but to
> spell out B.O.B

HTML:
<abbr title="whatever BOB stands for">B.O.B.</abbr>

CSS (media="aural"):
abbr {
  speak: spell-out;
}

It should be noted that the W3's spec[0] examples on abbr and acronym
tags are whacked.  In English anyway, acronyms are a specialized sort of
abbreviation, wherein the acronym is composed of initial letters of the
words in a multiword phrase.  The spec seems to have been written by
folks who were not clear on that.  Evolt has an article on this, too.[1]

http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/struct/text.html#edef-ABBR
http://evolt.org/article/HTML_is_not_an_acronym/17/35750/index.html

-- 
Maximillian Von Schwanekamp
http://www.neptunewebworks.com/



More information about the thelist mailing list