definition help

[kengr]

Running a accessibility checker on my websites, I got "reminded" about the ABBR and ACRONYM tags. Which led me to this question:

Is BDSM an acronym or an abbreviation? And whichever it is, what should the "expanded" version of the term be?

Comments

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

I think it's an abbreviation/initialism, as (if I recall correctly) an acronym has to be pronounceable as a word, not a set of letters.

My expansion of BDSM is "Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, and Sadism & Masochism".

[kengr]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I recall from the discussions that came up with it. I was just try to see how to word it, and I guess I overlkooked the obvious.

[freetrav.livejournal.com]

From the browser rendering engine point of view, there's (currently) no difference between ABBR and ACRONYM; if you hold (as I do) that HTML should be used strictly for semantic markup, then the proper one to use would be ABBR rather than ACRONYM.

As far as the expansion, I'm not part of that scene, so anything I might suggest on that would be an outsider's p.o.v. - but from there, janetmiles's suggestion looks at least as reasonable as anything else I've ever seen.

[kengr]

From the browser rendering engine point of view, there's (currently) no difference between ABBR and ACRONYM; if you hold (as I do) that HTML should be used strictly for semantic markup, then the proper one to use would be ABBR rather than ACRONYM.

Well, my main reason for adding it at all is because (I'm told) many screen readers will treat things flagged with ABBR or ACRONYM in a manner that makes it easier for blind users to understand the text.

No idea if the readers will treat the two tags differently. But if they'll get stuff prounounced letter by letter instead of trying to turn them into a word, that'll be a bonus.