Comment by samatman
5 years ago
As I tirelessly mention whenever this comes up on HN, which is often: we have a specific technology that is designed precisely for this situation.
It's called the link. All an author has to do is link the first instance of an acronym or piece of jargon to some authoritative description, and you get the best of both worlds: readers familiar with e.g. CRDTs[0] can just keep reading, and the rest can click the link and find out.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_...
Even better, just use the abbr tag. It's well supported and doesn't rely on an outside source to tell your readers what you're talking about.
“It’s well supported”, yet on latest mobile Safari, it doesn’t appear to work at all. This w3 demo code does not show me the full name anywhere in the rendered content -https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_ab...
Chrome on Android rather (un)helpfully selects 'The WHO' and gives me a link to the rock band.
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What about a long-press on the abbreviation? Does that do anything? I'm not on mobile now but I vaguely recall that working on some mobile platforms.
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Although it works on desktop Safari, there's no way to tell that you should be able to hover over it.
Relevant to the parent here, I prefer to use a link because it is more commonly expected and it gives me the opportunity to refer to a quality source for an in-depth explanation of what I'm referencing.
It is especially useful when writing a technical document that utilizes multiple products/stacks/terms. Creating links to quality sources for those items gives someone new to the content a good source to go deeper into those pieces while allowing me to focus the article on the specific aspect I'm writing about.
This is how you do that:
...then you use "CRDT" for the rest of the document.
Merely expanding an abbreviation is less useful than explaining it.
Better in some ways, worse in others. Better than either, I think, is both.
Wow, that's awesome! Thanks for the tip!
A lot of people seem to be questioning why you'd need this when you could just provide a full link. Personally I read a lot of technical documentation and having acronyms written out in full would almost always be enough. Otherwise the whole document is likely over my head, or it's just a bad acronym.
Does <abbr> work well on Android and iOS?
Not working for me on iOS
It doesn’t work on mobile
Do both!
In defense, the first sentence links to a Youtube video that expands the acronym in the first 10 seconds.
The video also gives good context for the article, even for a beginner to the topic.
Don't even have to - the third paragraph down they set the standard with "Operational Transform (OT)"
I agree, as does every good style guide, and even that can be improved by also making it a link.
Hypertext is great, links are practically free, I encourage authors to be liberal in applying them.
We also have select-contextmenu-search on both desktop and mobile, for any word or acronym. Links are nice for disambiguation or to point to a recommended resource, but they're hardly essential, nor are in-line expansions or definitions.
That's still lazy writing. Every blog should be written with the assumption it will be encountered by a non-specialist. Expanding abbreviations on first use and offering a brief explanation of jargon is enough to let these readers know if the article is something they are interested in.
Every blog? That's silly. People are allowed to have conversations about niche topics that you are not familiar with. You aren't the audience of every blog.
People are allowed and encouraged to speak freely about anything on the internet, but people seem to forget that this is the world wide web, and writers can't control who in the world shows up to their blog or site. With a little help, someone who might not be in the core audience, might actually enjoy or learn something. If everything is written with jargon and abbreviations with no context, it's really just lazy inconsiderate writing.
It never ceases to amaze me how many websites for restaurants or whatever neglect to mention basic things like what state (and country) they're in. Even newspaper web sites assume that we know that the "Chronicle" or the "Ledger" or whatever generic name is the local paper for East Bumblefuck.
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That's true, but most people underestimate how opaque their writing can be even to other experts. It doesn't mean you have to explain every piece of jargon, but you can often greatly improve the clarity of your writing, including for expert readers, by targeting at least a few levels of expertise below where you think your audience is. We all have gaps in our knowledge that will seem basic or obvious to others, no matter how expert we are in a topic.
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But also, the blog post should be able to focus on it's own business logic so to speak.
The same arguments for and against using libraries apply here, and it's up to the author which works best for their piece.
This is what introductory paragraphs/sections/chapters are for. Someone already well acquainted with the subject matter can quickly skim through them, while others less familiar with it get a quick catch-up.
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