Comments on: How To Define Acronyms Within Your Content

By: Kim A

Kim A — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:35:27 +0000

IA has raised a good point about the use of the tag as opposed to the tag as acronym is now a deprecated element in both HTML 5 and XHTML 2.0 .

You do need to use the title attribute to get the hover over affect though- USA

However, this raises problems of its own, as good old IE6 doesn’t recognise the element. I highly recommend the following article from A List Apart if anyone would like to get into the detail of it – http://www.alistapart.com/articles/hattrick . It is a bit out of date regarding its discussion of XHTML 2.0, which is pretty much a dead duck now that HTML5 is on the scene. But it has very sound advice regarding the correct usage to ensure accessibility of abbreviations.

jaseemumer’s comment above about people not knowing that there is extra information to be gained if you hover over an abbr element is very easily corrected in a CSS file – and most browsers have a default behaviour of placing a dotted line underneath.

By: parrot

parrot — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 01:54:11 +0000

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By: ia

ia — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:21:46 +0000

The tag will be dropped in the future version of HTML (HTML5). Use > instead. Same usage. From W3.org:

"acronym is not included because it has created lots of confusion. Authors are to use abbr for abbreviations."

By: jaseemumer

jaseemumer — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:13:18 +0000

Great tip, but I am not thinking about using it. People may not know they have to hover the word to know the meaning.

By: Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:51:36 +0000

You can also modify the cursor with {cursor: help;}. And style the abbr tag too. Here's what I do in my themes.

.entry-content abbr,
.entry-content acronym {
  border-bottom: 1px dotted #333;
  cursor: help;
}