I’ve become a fan of two html tags that go unused all too often. These tags a beautifully simple, rendered intuitively to the end-user, and serve a much needed function for noobs without getting in the way of us geeks.

<abbr title=”"> & <acronym title=”">

These tags allow for the in-line definition of acronyms where the definition is expanded onHover.

One downside, Blogger does not allow <abbr title=”"> & <acronym title=”"> tags in their comments. (Blogger, are you listening?!) A simple work-around is to use <a title=”">, but that will render as a hyper-text anchor link (rather than an abbr or acronym definition). This style might be able to be unified with a class designation (”hoverdefinition”)and handled by a style-sheet (where one would define acronym, abbr, and .hoverdefinition as having the same visual appearance, for example). It’s not a very pretty solution as you’d have to add the class=”hoverdefinition” attribute to every <a title=”" … &gt tag, which I doubt end-users making comments on one’s blog would even know about. Maybe Blogger will hear our plea and allow these tags in their comment posts. (Maybe I’m just over-zealous about these tags. )

On a related note, does anyone have any neat CSS tricks used with these tags? Please comment!