Comments on: HTML acronym tagging

By: Tzaddi

Tzaddi — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 04:03:23 +0000

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.

By: Lonnie

Lonnie — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 18:16:33 +0000

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 tag should only be used for acronyms; the 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 and 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 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.

By: Dhiraj Gupta

Dhiraj Gupta — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 16:10:37 +0000

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.

By: Lonnon

Lonnon — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 20:34:38 +0000

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.

By: Henrik Gemal

Henrik Gemal — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 14:38:17 +0000

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/

By: adyus

adyus — Thu, 14 Aug 2003 04:40:56 +0000

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?

By: meena

meena — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 10:45:45 +0000

hai’
how can we format the text in the title of an acronyam

By: Lonnon

Lonnon — Wed, 07 May 2003 17:59:00 +0000

The formatting that you’re talking about, which got munched by Movable Type, is SWAK. 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 or 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.

By: progster

progster — Wed, 07 May 2003 15:35:24 +0000

won’t whatever work as well? (actually I should test that… lazy)

~Progster