Help with some "special characters" & ABBR/ACRONYM

[Fred]

I've got two little problems....I hope you can help:

(1) I'm getting a couple of items flagged as "invalid SGML" and I
don't know what to do with them.

.... trailing periods

-- well, it doesn't quite look like that (but it wouldn't cut &
paste properly); it looks like 2 or 3 hyphens butted up together
(e.g., December 6--The Feast of St. Stephen)


(2) I'm confused re whether I should be coding ABBR or ACRONYM for the
following:

DOT - Department of Transportation

FLQ - Front de Liberation du Quebec

a.s.a.p. - as soon as possible

I don't know....I guess in conversation, I've been using abbreviation
and acronym interchangeably. I suspect they are two distinct things
in HTML/CSS ???

Thanks for your help !

Fred

 

[Steve Pugh]

(1) I'm getting a couple of items flagged as "invalid SGML" and I
don't know what to do with them.

URL?
We need to see what's actually in the HTML code to see what the
problem is.

... trailing periods

An ellipsis.
Easiest way is to cheat and just to use three full stop characters.
… and … are both correct.

-- well, it doesn't quite look like that (but it wouldn't cut &
paste properly); it looks like 2 or 3 hyphens butted up together
(e.g., December 6--The Feast of St. Stephen)

— or — might be what you mean.

(2) I'm confused re whether I should be coding ABBR or ACRONYM for the
following:

I don't know....I guess in conversation, I've been using abbreviation
and acronym interchangeably. I suspect they are two distinct things
in HTML/CSS ???

An abbreviation is an abbreviation. An acronym is a sub-set of
abbreviation, one that is pronounced as a word. The HTML spec is
confused because the authors couldn't agree on what an acronym
actually is.

DOT - Department of Transportation

Do you prounouce it 'dot' or 'dee oh tee'? If it's 'dot' then it's an
acronym, otherwise it's an abbreviation.

FLQ - Front de Liberation du Quebec

I'm guessing that this is spelt out letter by letter? So it's an
abbreviation.

a.s.a.p. - as soon as possible

This can be either. Some people say it as a word and some people spell
it out. In this case the full stops between the letters imply that
it's spelt out letter by letter and hence is an abbreviation.

Steve

 

[Toby A Inkster]

An abbreviation is an abbreviation. An acronym is a sub-set of
abbreviation, one that is pronounced as a word. The HTML spec is
confused because the authors couldn't agree on what an acronym
actually is.

And because of the confusion, <acronym/> is being removed from XHTML2, so
best to alwasy use <abbr/> for forwards compatibility.