Difference between <abbr> & <acronym>?

[harlene]

What is the usage difference in the tags <abbr> & <acronym>? It appears to me
that both tags produce the same result. Is it the default for these tags to
change the cursor into a question mark? Do you always need to use the attribute
"title" with these tags?

I did a search on the forum for this topic and saw a post that stated IE6
doesn't recognize <abbr>. Is that accurate? How would you get around that?

(Questions, questions, questions. . .inquiring minds want to know. . .
:confused; )

Thanks.

[Lionstone]

Well, in practice, there isn't a difference. Both tend to give you a
different cursor and a tooltip showing the title attribute. Yes, they're
both relatively useless without the title attribute. You can change the
cursor and appearance using CSS.

IE does not recognize <abbr>; you can get around it by using only <acronym>.
I doubt many grammarians would bother to check your source code. ;)
You can also use <abbr> with a span as follows:
<abbr><span class="abbr" title="HyperText Markup
Language">HTML</span></abbr>

You'd then attach all your styles to class .abbr rather than the tag abbr.

Still - is it really that important? :)

[harlene]

Thanks for your explanation.

[mzanime.com]

That wasn't a very good explanation.

Both of those tags improve the page's web accessibility, and they allow you to
specify the full spelled-out word of an acronym or an abbreviated word. For
example:

<acronym title="HyperText Markup Language">HTML</acronym>

<abbr title="Number">No.</abbr>

Every modern Gecko based browser will automatically add a dotted underline if
you use either of these tags, but IE will not. Also, IE doesn't support <abbr>,
but I often use <acronym> much more frequently than <abbr> anyway.

One work around for IE, is to add this to your style sheet. It allows the
<acronym> tag to be more noticable when used, plus these tags popup a tooltip
when you hover your mouse over them.

acronym { cursor:help; border-bottom:dotted 1px #CCC; }

[harlene]

Thanks, Mike. Your explanation and css suggestion are very helpful.