<acronym> considered harmful
By Erik van Kempen | March 29, 2007
Since I joined W3C's HTML WG, the mostly discussed tag has been <acronym>. The discussion is about whether this tag should be dropped from the HTML 5 specification. I, as a minimalist, think it should be dropped.
Why do I think it should not be included in the next HTML spec? Let's have a look at the definitions of the word:
- acronym
- An abbreviation formed by (usually initial) letters taken from a word or series of words, and which is itself pronounced as a word or any abbreviation so formed, regardless of pronunciation.
According to this definition, an acronym is some sort of abbreviation. Then why don't we just use the <abbr>? You could say it can be used to show the abbreviation is of some special sort, but that could be added in an attribute too. But I don't think it's necessary to know if it's an acronym or not.
We should be very careful with approving tags. If we needed a tag for every special situation, not one of us will be able to tell which tag can be used best, semantically or technically. Tags need to add significant semantic value. Take images for example: I prefer <img> above <jpeg>, <gif>, <png>. Don't you?
The proponents of <acronym> defend their opinion by saying that this will ease text-to-speech synthesis, which is used to keep the web accessible for everyone. I think user agents should solve this problem theirselves, like they have been doing for a long time with images for example. The synthesis apps should know that JPEG (is this even considered to be an acronym, or is it a hybrid?) is pronounced as [ˈdʒeɪpɛg] (IPA) or acronyms such as RADAR.
If you still want to have the difference between normal abbreviations and acronyms in HTML, a special pronunciation attribute could be added to the <abbr>-tag.
Example:
<abbr title="Portable Network Graphics" pronunciation="/pɪŋ/">PNG</abbr>
The <abbr> could also be renamed to <short> in order to be able to use it for every shorthand notation.