Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 12/15/29 11:45

On Wed, 19 Apr 2006, Andy Dingley wrote:

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

Objection! Don't mark it up with the *wrong* markup just to pacify a
piece of non-conforming software. If an abbreviation *must* work on
IE, you could perfectly well wrap the correct markup (abbr, which you
provide for www-compatible software) in

<span class="abbr" title="whatever">...</span>

for IE, which will persuade IE to work as intended and without having
to tell lies.

It's a bit verbose, but at least it's accurate.

You'd better also take into consideration Jukka's objections to
marking currency codes as abbreviations, though.

> The pair of elements are poorly thought out, so they're confused and
> overlapping.

Indeed, and made worse by mutually contradictory definitions in the
HTML4 specifications.

> If you use it, use title attributes and I'd suggest
> class="currency-code" or class="ISO4217" too.

Fair comment.

Btw, I'm told that IE7 will finally support <abbr>. Not that I really
care what IE7 supports, since it's still going to be in deliberate
violation of various interworking specifications, and thereby rules
*itself* out as a web compatible browser.

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