Acronyms - how should they be handled?

Follow the W3C rules or devise a new method?

[Hester]

Acronyms bother me. Let's face it, they are limited to just a list of the words in full. Eg: IE requires an acronym with a title that says "Internet Explorer". But what if you want to give more information than that?

I've come up with one solution, which is probably invalid in many ways, but offers a way to give genuinely USEFUL information to the user about an acronym. I added a Glossary in my side column, explaining what the common acronyms were about.

Take PHP for instance. The full acronym title is horrendous, and tells the user nothing about what it actually does. Is it a browser? Or a programming language?

My Glossary for PHP tells the user that it's "a programming language that produces non-static web pages". OK, not 100% accurate, it can also produce static pages as well, but at least the visitor realises what it's about.

The problems with this approach are obvious. The user will need to see the Glossary is there, and refer to it. (At the moment it's at the bottom of my side column, so likely out of view.)

Secondly, although it covers ALL acronyms on any page in one go, it doesn't help screenreaders, unless the Glossary is read out first. (And what is the effect of reading it out? Is the user annoyed at the extra text?)

But if you use standard acronyms, I don't think you are allowed to add extra information in them. Why? Because I've noticed one screenreader I tested replaced all acronyms with the title (ie: the full words). This was a pain for our company name, which is quite long when spelt out. I'm sure a blind user would be sick of hearing it in full after a few paragraphs.

So what's the answer? Well one idea I haven't tried could be to use Javascript and add a button on the page to toggle the acronyms from short to full length. So the user can press the button to see what the acronyms mean, but return the text on the page to hide the full words if they wanted. This could be done using the DOM to replace the acronyms with their title text.

Another consideration is whether or not to include the acronym tag EVERY time one is used on a page. I'm fairly sure the W3C Accessibility Guidelines say it's OK to use an acronym once, when it's first encountered, but the version 2.0 draft they're working on requires them to be used every time they occur.

I just don't like the current situation where a page can become a mess of acronyms. Where do you draw the line? Which ones are safe to allow untagged (because everyone knows what they mean) and which aren't? Do you tag things like etc, AD, am, pm, Mac, PC?

Should a design site mean WYSIWYG, HTML and CSS shouldn't need acronyms? Or do we assume someone is new to the web and might not know what they mean. I just think they won't be much better off knowing that HTML means "HyperText Markup Language" - what the? Besides, there is much debate that you should use the abbreviation tag for that one instead, as it's not an acronym. Only one problem - IE doesn't support the required tag. Nor does the XHTML 2 spec. (And should "spec" be given a tag and the title "specification"?)

[Distel]

You could link each first occurence of an acronym to an anchor on a page with an acronym list that opens in a different window.

[Reflection]

Hester, what about using a combination of <ACRONYM> and definition lists?

Something like:

<dl>
<dt><acronym title="Hyper Text Markup Language">HTML</acronym></dt>
<dd>HTML is... </dd>
</dl>

[chadmg]

In writing about programming there are tons of acronyms so I've pondered your question myself. I concluded that the best solution for my site was to only use it once in an article, but multiple times in other pages like forums for those articles. Since I belive the purpose is to just make it easier on the user, I'll make an acronym for "IMHO" on every post in my forum, since someone could very likely skip through those posts reading only selectively. As for only once in pages like articles, that's the way it's been established in print, so that's good enough for me.

But I don't feel you need to define all of those acronyms. Unless you feel that your website should encompass EVERYTHING on your subject. I think it's more intended for things like IMHO or a company name acronym than HTML. If someone wants a definition for html and your site doesn't provide it, than they can search for it.

You can always make it an anchor tag with the same (acronym) title attribute that links to a definition page or a popup window with the definition.