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".

[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.