ACRONYM - Acronym

The ACRONYM element is used to markup acronyms. The TITLE attribute is useful in conjunction with ACRONYM to give the long form of the acronym, allowing visual browsers to provide the long form as a "tooltip". Examples:

• <ACRONYM TITLE="North Atlantic Treaty Organization">NATO</ACRONYM>
• <ACRONYM TITLE="radio detecting and ranging">radar</ACRONYM>
• <ABBR TITLE="Federal Bureau of Investigation">FBI</ABBR>

Unlike other kinds of abbreviations, acronyms are pronounceable words, though in some cases the pronunciation is strictly a presentation issue. For example, "SQL" and "URL" are pronounced as words by some people and pronounced letter-by-letter by others. In such cases, authors should use the ABBR element, possibly with a style sheet rule specifying the pronunciation for aural rendering.

More Information

• ACRONYM in W3C HTML 4.0 Recommendation

Copyright © 1998 by Liam Quinn. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).