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W3C Web Standards Evangelism Mailing List

Sunday July 7th, 2002

Brant Langer Gurganus writes: "The Quality Assurance Interest Group at the W3C has created a new Evangelism mailing-list: public-evangelist. Its mission is to encourage and discuss web standards education."

To subscribe, send an email to public-evangelist-request@w3.org with "Subscribe" as the Subject. Hopefully this new mailing list will encourage more Gecko-friendly sites on the Web. Also take a look at the Mozilla Evangelism page to find out how you can help with Mozilla's own evangelism efforts.

#1 Acronym Tag

by MXN

Sunday July 7th, 2002 7:17 PM

I'm glad to see major sites (MZ is a major site to me) are starting to use the <acronym> (X)HTML tag. Of course, most of us here know what the W3C is, but it's a good start.

- MXN

#2 Re: Acronym Tag

by AlexBishop

Sunday July 7th, 2002 7:36 PM

"I'm glad to see major sites (MZ is a major site to me) are starting to use the <acronym> (X)HTML tag. Of course, most of us here know what the W3C is, but it's a good start."

Actually, it was <abbr>. :-)

Alex

#3 Re: Re: Acronym Tag

by MXN

Sunday July 7th, 2002 7:48 PM

:^) Well, I think it should've been an <acronym> tag.

- MXN

#4 Re: Re: Re: Acronym Tag

by AlexBishop

Sunday July 7th, 2002 8:03 PM

"Well, I think it should've been an <acronym> tag."

An acronym is "a word formed from or based on the initial letters or syllables of other words".

So W3C is an abbreviation. :-)

Alex

#5 No it's not.

by paulm

Monday July 8th, 2002 2:44 AM

An abbreviation is made by reducing a word by taking parts out of it. WWWC would be an acronym. I'm not sure whatever they've done to reduce it to W3C is a standard part of English grammer. Perhaps it's a geekronym

#6 Re: No it's not.

by SmileyBen

Monday July 8th, 2002 4:12 AM

Actually, you're wrong.

NATO is an acronym, so is NASA and AIDS. WTO and UN however are not. The point is, if you pronounce the initials as if it's a word, that's an acronym, if you don't, it's not...

#7 acronym vs. abbereviation

by peterlairo

Monday July 8th, 2002 8:05 AM

from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=acronym*1+0

acronym noun [C] an abbreviation consisting of the first letters of each word in the name of something, pronounced as a word

abbreviation noun [C] UN is the usual abbreviation for the United Nations.

#8 Lost cause

by choess

Monday July 8th, 2002 1:27 PM

This issue has been discussed pretty extensively on Usenet, coming to the conclusion that <acronym> and <abbr> aren't very useful categories (at least in the supposed context of speech browsers, where it's most important to distinguish between acronyms and initialisms), and that the examples in the spec show distinct lack of clue. Maybe this will get sorted out in XHTML 2.0.