This years political elections have brought acronyms to the forefront for me. I’m used to technology acronyms (XML, CSS), I’m used to IM acronyms (LOL, BRB), and I’m used to government acronyms (FBI, CIA, SBC). I am not used to government rating acronyms, various lobbying group acronyms and frankly I’ve been known to mix up the ACLU with UCLA.

If web developers and designers would simply use <acronym title="Some Acronym">SA</acronym> tags then they might find it a lot easier for people to understand their online content as well as avoid complicated chartes with heavy footnoting. The example that drove me over the edge and caused me to write this article can be found at the National Journal web site which has an Almanac of American Politics. There I was reading up on John Kerry. Not because I wanted to vote for him, or didn’t but because I was checking out the facts reported on a piece of Pro-Bush propoganda. The propoganda said that he was the most liberal member of the Senate.

At the page about Kerry there is a chart that has more acronyms than I know what to do with. Worse than the acronyms is that they’re in HTML tables without using the <acronym> tags! for the lengthy list of politcal groups. You have to click on a link (above the table) to see an explanation of the table as well as a description of the groups. By using valid HTML markup they could have added a caption that described the table and then used the acronym tag to tell me what each acronym was for. To futher learn about the group they could have made the acronym a link that pointed to the group’s description data.

I recognize this could take a little more time in development, but the outcome would have been a potentially valid HTML table, an easier to understand chart and some data that would allow me to find out that John Kerry is indeed liberal. However, that particular chart did not have the data I was after, data that ranked Kerry in his liberal field of politicians. That sort of data would be really handy to have linked to near that chart. It was linked to, further down the page and so here I found that Kerry was the most liberal in his voting when compared last year.

Anyway, you got a little mix of politics with web standards, but that’s OK, last time you got religion and web standards 🙂 If you’re using PHP check out Matt‘s excellent acronym definer. In WordPress you can find the Acronym Plugin on the wiki.