Steve Kelem wrote:
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.
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.)
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.)
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 _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list xdg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
