I was puzzled to see this post from Chad showing up in my feeds reader with a nice underlined word, animated when mousing over it.
It so occurs that the acronym tag can be used to do that. No Javascript involved.
This might be an old trick, but it just works. Thanks Chad!
UPDATE: See the comments, use abbr instead.
UPDATE 2: See Chad’s post:
1.
: a tag that is supported by more browsers now, but may become obsolete in the future, judging by a proposed specification that may one day become a standard
2.: a tag that, right now, isn’t supported properly by the browser with the single biggest share of the market — and, thus, the browser used by the most potential visitors or customers at your website
Use abbr instead, acronym is deprecated in HTML 5, time to start not using it.
Thanks!
No . . . you’d better stick with acronym for now.
1. HTML 5 isn’t a standard yet.
2. XHTML still supports the acronym tag.
3. The abbr tag is not supported by Internet Explorer.
Also . . . make sure your CSS provides styling for the acronym tag to give it that underline, if you want everyone to see the underline. While Firefox automatically styles acronym tags that way, that styling is not part of the HTML/XHTML standard, and IE doesn’t provide any default styling for the acronym tag. This means that text in an acronym tag in IE doesn’t automatically render any differently than other text, and this behavior is actually standards compliant.
So . . . to summarize:
Use acronym instead of abbr for now, because IE doesn’t support abbr.
Make sure your site’s CSS includes styling for the acronym tag so that acronyms will stand out from the surrounding text.
IE 6 will show the abbr tag, just not the tooltip. IE 7 fixes that bug. So look at your stats and decide if you even care.
Seeing that IE 6 is diminishing, I would not change the content to suite IE 6, maybe resort to a PHP/JavaScript hack to make abbr behave like acronym. But on my blog IE 6 usage is low and dropping steadily, that I don’t care enough to hack the template. If I don’t care to hack the template, I definitely don’t care to create the wrong content.
“IE 6 will show the abbr tag, just not the tooltip.”
. . . which is what differentiates text with the abbr or acronym tag from untagged text. Kinda pointless.
“Seeing that IE 6 is diminishing, I would not change the content to suite IE 6, maybe resort to a PHP/JavaScript hack to make abbr behave like acronym.”
I have readers who would be inconvenienced by a JavaScript hack, to say nothing of the fact that’s a “solution” that requires more effort for the same effects in fewer cases.
“If I don’t care to hack the template, I definitely don’t care to create the wrong content.”
You must have a very weird definition of the terms in the phrase “the wrong content” here.
Wrong content: any time you use the acronym tag for an abbreviation. An acronym, however, is also an abbreviation.