XHTML Tutorial: Standards-Based Web Design

by Paul Bohman

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Abbreviations and Acronyms

Abbreviations and acronyms should be marked up with <abbr> or <acronym> tags, as appropriate. Browsers which support these elements will allow a "tooltip" or a "popup" to appear when you hover your mouse over the acronym or abbreviation, so that users can see the full expansion of the term. This information is also available to the technologies used by people with disabilities.

The acronym and abbreviation tags should appear whenever acronyms or abbreviations are used. It can be a bit of a pain to do this if the page has many acronyms or abbreviations, but it can also be useful to people with disabilities. We'll get into the details of how it helps them in future lesson topic.

What's the difference between an acronym and and an abbreviation? The truth is that there isn't much of a difference. In fact, in future versions of XHTML, they're going to get rid of the <acronym> element entirely, and use only the <abbr> element, because both elements serve essentially the same purpose. Unfortunately, for now we have to stick mainly with the <acronym> element rather than with the <abbr> element because Internet Explorer 6 doesn't support the <abbr> element. Internet Explorer 7 does, but not all IE users have converted to IE 7 yet.