[whatwg] Abbreviations (was: W3C compatibility)

[David Latapie]

On Mon, 12 Feb 2007 11:30:02 -0500, David Walbert wrote:
> So "initialism" is a sequence of initial letters that is pronounced 
> as individual letters, and "acronym" is a sequence of initial letters 
> that is pronounced as if it were a word. Both are printed in all caps 
> (by default anyway). Yes?

Until lexicalisation comes into play. Lexicalisation is the fact that a 
word becomes so used that it is not considered an abbreviation anymore 
- example include BARBARA from the alchemists and more recently, LASER.

> <abbr title="Mister" class="wordpart">Mr.</abbr>
> <abbr title="January" class="wordpart">Jan.</abbr>

That is what I call abbreviation (I'm French) and so is a subset 
[abbr-sub], but the English usage seems to be that abbreviation is the 
superset [abbr-sup].

We would have to decide whether:
* we have abbr-sub. We may need another word for the tag, if we take 
the microformat route
* we have abbr-sup. We may need another word for the class, if we take 
the microformat route ("contraction", as suggested earlier, looks good).
-- 
</david_latapie>             U+0F00
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