Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Acronyms and abbreviations

The abbr element indicates that text is an abbreviation: a shortened form of a word ending in a period, such as Mass., Inc., or etc. Acronyms (indicated with the acronym element) are abbreviations formed from the initial letters or groups of letters of words in a phrase, such as WWW and USA. An acronym may be pronounced as a word (NATO) or letter by letter (FBI).

The title attribute may be added to either element to provide the full name or longer form. The value of the title attribute may be displayed as a “tool tip” by visual browsers, or read aloud by a speech device.

<acronymtitle="National Aeronautics and Space Administration">NASA
       </acronym>
    <abbr title="Tablespoons">Tbs.</abbr>

Marking up shorthand terms such as abbreviations and acronyms provides useful information on how they should be interpreted by user agents such as spellcheckers, aural devices, and search-engine indexers. It also improves the accessibility of the content.

Tip

The CSS 2.1 specification provides the informative speak aural property that allows authors to specify whether an acronym should be read as a word or spoken letter by letter, as shown here:

    acronym#FBI {speak: spell-out;}

The speak property is documented in Appendix B.