<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Dan Winship said the following on 10/13/2005 10:02 AM: <blockquote cite="mid434E9340.6050702@novell.com" type="cite">Steve Kelem wrote: <blockquote type="cite">I disagree. Tellling the reader what an acronym means allows the reader to look it up, even if you don't provide a pointer to where to get more info. </blockquote> Googling for "CSS" gives "about 236,000,000" hits. Googling for "Cascading Style Sheets" gives "about 10,100,000" hits. The acronym is 20 times more commonly-used than the name. (Doing a search on Amazon titles, the advantage drops to a mere factor of 4.) </blockquote> Right. I'll bet there are other meanings for CSS, but not for "Cascading Style Sheets". (Well, maybe Martha Stewart has something called that, but one could rule it out based on context.) The <a href="http://www.acronymfinder.com">Acronym Finder </a>(AF) found 145 meanings for CSS. (Cascading Style Sheets happens to be the most common.) <blockquote cite="mid434E9340.6050702@novell.com" type="cite"> CSS is even a bit of an edge case here; "JPEG" gets 140 times more hits than "Joint Photographic Experts Group". "PCI" gets 1400 times more hits than "Peripheral Component Interconnect". (Raise your hand if you even knew what PCI stood for. Oh, hi there, you in the back. Now go back to writing device drivers.) </blockquote> You're still supporting my position. (AF found only one common meaning for JPEG, 7 for JPG, 66 for PCI. VFD turns up 21, 10 of which are references to Lemony Snicket!) <blockquote cite="mid434E9340.6050702@novell.com" type="cite"> When the acronym is the standard way of referring to something, we should follow standard usage and just use the acronym. In most such cases, expanding the acronym won't actually provide the user with any useful information. If we want to give users more help at identifying mystery files, it would be more useful to provide a description ("Style sheet for a web page", "Format for storing photo-quality images very compactly") than to just expand the acronyms. -- Dan </blockquote> Again, if you're working in the area, you probably know what it means. But you need to remember that you have newcomers who may not know the term. They're not necessarily stupid--they may be experts in other areas and now need to access info in this new (to them) domain. Steve P.S. I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science, have been working as an computer scientist for over 25 years. I try to keep abreast of what's going on in many domains. When I saw the following title of the talk in a newsletter <img src="cid:part1.07020407.09090303@elementcxi.com" alt="" height="3" width="1"> <a href="http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=10285&s=1&k=6EC1FA4A73CED66BB99FDDFCED1C4A46&partnerref=sitepost">How to Drive Up Reporting Adoption and ROI in an SAP BW Environment - Vendor Webcast</a> I realized I didn't have a clue what "Reporting Adoption" referred to. I doubt it has anything with babies or parents. ROI, I'm pretty sure means Return on Investment. I don't have a clue what SAP or BW are. (AF turns up 104 meanings. The 100th one (Systems and Procedures) in the list may be appropriate, but I'm still not sure.) Their web site didn't explain any of these terms, so I expect that you had to already know what the acronyms mean and they're not trying to encourage more people to find out what they mean. I guess that implies a paranoid notion of "job security". </body> </html>