Abbreviations and Acronyms
Acronyms are a specialized abbreviation where the initial letters are spoken as a word rather than spelled out. In most cases it is proper to use the much more common abbreviation than an acronym. And example of an abbreviation would be HTML. An example of an acronym would be RADAR.
Most browser process and style this mark-up. Unfortunately, the still commonly-used Internet Explorer version 6 doesn’t recognize the abbreviation element and thus cannot properly process the information or provide the styling. I do, however, offer a fix. What follows is an example of each and how I write them.
Abbreviation
Using the example in the first paragraph, I will show you how I wrote the HTML abbreviation.
<abbr><span class="abbr" title="HyperText Markup Language">HTML</span></abbr>
Acronym
Using the example in the first paragraph, I will show you how I wrote the RADAR acronym.
<acronym title="RAdio Detection And Ranging"<RADAR</acronym>
In both cases above the “help” cursor and underline you see is defined by the style sheet.
