Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 06/04/07 06:52

Scripsit dorayme:

> Yes, src has seemed to many of us, I am sure, an abbreviation by
> the usual method of vowel removal.

Some people seem to have though of it as a misspelling of "scr", presumably
short for "screen". I've rather often seen the attribute name as "scr", and
although it could be just a typo (metathesis), I've wondered whether it has
some explanation.

Nevertheless, the SRC in <IMG SRC> stands for the attribute that indicates
the URL of the image. Nothing more, nothing less. We can discuss its
historic origin at any length, and the explanation as an abbreviation of
"source" is most probably correct, but it has no impact on the _meaning_ of
the attribute. Once you take a word or abbreviation from a natural language
and define it e.g. as an element name, attribute name, function name, or
whatever, it by definition loses connection with the natural language - it's
just a defined symbol, with no other meaning than the one you have given to
it.

This is particularly important when you consider names that were chosen
poorly, such as the element name "a" or the CSS property name
"letter-spacing" (which affects the spacing between all characters, not just
letters) or "white-space" (which also affects line breaking in strings
containing no white space).

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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