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Acronym markup and Bobsleds

A few weeks ago, I had a discussion with Guy Leo of Galileo IMS, a friend of mine who does some work with the USBSF. We were discussing how to identify an acronym in a press release I was writing. Guy wanted me to do the traditional thing which is to identify the acronym by following it with the expanded phrase immediately following the first use in a document.

As a bit of an HTML prude, I think that's pretty FUBAR, or Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition.

The code looks like this, if you're interested:

<acronym title="HyperText Markup Language">HTML</acronym>

If you're really interested, this tag falls in the category of phrase elements. Phrase elements add structural information to text fragments, according to the documentation.

The other phrase elements are:

  • em
  • strong
  • cite
  • dfn
  • code
  • samp
  • kbd
  • var
  • abbr
The USBSFsite is at http://www.usbsf.com/.