Just when I thought I knew everything there is to know about HTML (or at least everything worth knowing), I run across the <acronym> tag:
<acronym title="Sealed With A Kiss">SWAK</acronym>
Example: SWAK
Modern browsers pop up the title text when you hover over the tagged acronym. Given that I’m writing HTML-based documentation for a living right now, this little discovery could actually be relevant in a showing-me-the-money sort of way.
I ran across this gem by playing with Dean Allen’s Textile, which is billed as a “humane Web text generator”. Textile has apparently been recreated by Brad Choate as a plugin for Movable Type. I’ll have to look into tacking it onto this Web site’s blogging interface; Textile is a joy to use, even for a hardcore gotta-enter-the-HTML-by-hand guy like me.
Most of my HTML knowledge is still from the 3.2 days; I ought to look around for a good 4.0 reference and see what other goodies have entered the language while I wasn’t looking.
9 Comments
won’t whatever work as well? (actually I should test that… lazy)
~Progster
The formatting that you’re talking about, which got munched by Movable Type, is <span title=“Sealed With A Kiss”>SWAK</span>. Yes, using span with a title does allow for a tool tip to appear when you hover the mouse over the text, but there’s no visual indication of an acronym, so the user has no way of knowing that she can mouse over the word.
Mozilla and its descendents put a dotted underline under words with the <acronym> or <abbr> tags to let you know that you can hover to get an expanded definition via tool tip. IE displays a tool tip, but it unfortunately doesn’t have any visual indicator that there’s an acronym lurking there in the text.
hai’
how can we format the text in the title of an acronyam
Just stumbled upon this page googling for acronym :)
Aren’t blogs just great?
Progster, can’t you fix the “nothing showing it’s an acronym” problem in Explorer by using CSS and underlining it?
Why dont you use MT::Plugins::Acronym ?
Acronym is a plugin for Movable Type that adds acronym tags to known acronyms.
http://gemal.dk/mt/
I’d never heard of MT::Plugins::Acronym. Thank you for pointing it out to me; I may have to install it and give it a whirl.
Can you assign a URL to the acronym as well? I mean, it looks like a much more convenient html tag than using the a href=“whatever” title=“whatever” routine.
Perhaps a way to have the link on the tooltip, itself? Or am I asking too much? ;-)
Dhiraj.
Well, throwing links and such into an acronym tag might be possible with Javascript, but honestly, it’s an abuse of the semantics of the tag. The <acronym> tag should only be used for acronyms; the <a> tag is really what’s intended for making links.
Using the wrong tag for the job causes more problems than offending the sensibilities of semantic markup wonks like me. Screen readers and other alternative browser types rely on the semantics of tags like <acronym> and <a> to be used as they were originally intended, and changing how you use these basic tags can cause a real mess for these browsers when they try to figure out how to render the page.
Now, if you want to get all fancy about it while maintaining proper semantics, I suppose you could add scripting to an <a> tag that would pop up some kind of hovertext linky thing, but it’s still a departure from how most people are used to using the Web, which makes it terrible from an accessibility standpoint. Convention is a good thing if you want your website to be usable.
I found your site googling “acronym”, but now that I see your “Biological posting only” I have to ask: is it an MT plugin or part of the newer MT? I use an old version of MT and the spammers still get me now and then. (I do use MT-blacklist but it’s more reactive than this method.) Thanks.