Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 08/31/07 09:09

Scripsit John:

> Many thanks for the many replies.

Unfortunately it seems that you have missed or ignored most of their best
content.

> Yes, I know, desserts is not an acronym . It was just an example.

When you present an example, a manifestly bad example is usually
symptomatic - a good example of what you're doing, though.

> Now, the &13;&10; work well in IE but not in FF.

The character references, when written correctly, denote a line break, which
is incorrectly treated by IE as causing a line break in visual rendering and
treated correctly as equivalent to a space by FF, and treated in various
confusing and partly funny ways by some older browsers.

It's no different from an actual line break, except that it may look like
cool technospeak and obfuscates your markup a bit.

I actually explained this already, in somewhat different words.

> So I'm half way there.

What should you do if you are half way digging yourself down into a deep
hole?

> Other browsers I don't really care about.

Such as IE 8, which may well fix the current IE bug, right?

> Is <acronym> the best to use? In this case it is.

Of course not. Especially if you have to ask, <acronym> is not the right
element.

If you just want to entertain yourself with tiny popup windows on mouseover,
on both of the browsers you know, then use a piece of CSS and JavaScript (or
maybe just CSS), giving you _much_ better options. Then there's no reason to
use <acronym> of course. You can use <a>, it's faster to type!

If you wish to present some content in a useful way, it's a different story,
and you haven't even started telling about it yet.

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

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