Texy seems to handle ABBR tags and ACRONYM tags as the same thing when indeed they are quite different and now that accessibility is becoming more of an issue, should be addressed.

// This is an abbreviation
"S.P.C.A."((Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals))

// This is an acronym
"NATO"((North Atlantic Treaty Organization))

// They of course generate the same code
<acronym title="Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals">S.P.C.A.</acronym>

// When that should be \
<abbr title="Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals">S.P.C.A.</abbr>

The different tags would be nice since it gives better control of styling but the most important issue is accessibility and the fact that one is spelled out and the other is spoken normally.

Abbreviations can be either initialism (first letter of each word) or truncation (truncated with '.' appended) but acronyms are always spoken as words.

Where this is affected is in the 'speak' css styling (an accessibility feature)

abbr.initialism {speak: spell-out;}
abbr.truncation {speak: normal;}
acronym         {speak: normal;}

I notice that on the DOCs page http://texy.info/en/syntax there is a typo error that reads

víceslovnc: <acronym title="a další">et al.</abbr>

I noticed that in one case (ABBR) he used quotes and in the second (NATO) he did not.
I thought that this might make a difference but it didn't.

This might be a simple way to judge them apart since acronyms don't have spaces.
A test could be made for a period in the text also (S.P.C.A. vs NATO)

These wouldn't require syntax changes to texy just testing for.

I know that most text-to-speech algorythms make a good guess at it but do much better with control.
Is there another way to generate the ABBR tag?

- Kent

Comments

pepe roni’s picture

When I first ran into the same problem, I also thought this was a bug. But in html5 there will be no acronym-tag any more (at least I didn't find it: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html). The reason: abbr and acronym have been mostly used in the same manner.

The difference between surrounding with quotes or not is simple: If you have one word, you can leave out the quotes, if you have a phrase, you must surround it by quotes.

Ah, about errors and typos in the docs: Maybe the Czech documentation might be perfect (I am not able to read or understand it), but the English and German docs are horrible and erroneous: e.g. links are not written as [linktext]:the_link_url but as "linktext":the_link_url, some features are described in the German docs only, some are described in the English docs only. Both docs end up with Czech explanations.

The author of the Texy! converter (not to mix up with the author of the Drupal texy Filter module!) has done a great job with the converter, but a bad job with documentation.