Posted by Andy Dingley on 10/09/43 11:45

dnn wrote:

> Are currency codes such as USD, EUR, GBP, etc. to be put in an abbr or
> acronym tag?

<abbr>

But don't expect it to achieve anything except maybe a hook to hang
some CSS on

If it's an intranet app and you _must_ work on IE, then use <acronym>,
because <abbr> simply doesn't.

The pair of elements are poorly thought out, so they're confused and
overlapping. They also fail to cover something more useful that's
harder to describe, the idea of "Atomic concept from some unimportant
origin that's recognisable, usable, but unpronouncable". <abbr> comes
closest though.

If you use it, use title attributes and I'd suggest
class="currency-code" or class="ISO4217" too. Personally I also tend
to repeat the code itself into the class, e.g. class="ISO4217 XAU" If
I'm using these at all I'm doing it automatically (XSLT) and it's quite
commonplace that I find myself wanting to start colour highlighting
particular currencies on a page.

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