Generalize principle about avoiding abbreviations?

[LeaVerou]

There is currently no rule against abbreviations in the "naming" section, but there is this sentence in the 3.4. Naming of CSS properties and values section (should this be moved to the naming section?):

Abbreviations are generally avoided.

This seems more broadly applicable, but I'm not sure of the extent. For example, HTML: In the past, we'd heavily abbreviate names of HTML elements (e.g. <img>, <ul>, <h1> etc), whereas recently this is less common (e.g. <video>, <source> (not <src>), <header>, <datalist> etc).
In JS, there are several abbreviations, some common, some less so, e.g. Id, async, Intl, BigInt, RegExp, UInt to name a few.

It might be good to figure out what the rule should be here, i.e. can we define in which cases abbreviations are a good idea and in which cases they are not? It seems this depends on:

• How common is the abbreviation?
• How many characters are saved?
• How often are people expected to type this? (by @annevk)
• Is there precedent? (Unless the precedent happens to be awful, it's usually good practice to match it.) (by @annevk) Related: New design principle: Consistency #285
• ...anything else?

[LeaVerou]

This came up here: w3ctag/design-reviews#547 (comment)
Is num acceptable or should be discouraged?

Edit: We suggested droppedEntriesCount instead of numDroppedEntries, we may want to use that as an example in the eventual principle.

[cynthia]

Counterexamples that are fine to abbreviate are probably ones that are canonically used in abbreviated form. (like names of common standards, e.g. DOM)

Not sure where rAF fits in though.

[LeaVerou]

@cynthia I was primarily referring to abbreviations that are not acronyms or initialisms. Those are a whole different topic.

[annevk]

Other considerations:

1. Is there precedent? (Unless the precedent happens to be awful, it's usually good practice to match it.)
2. How often are people expected to type this?

[LeaVerou]

Is there precedent? (Unless the precedent happens to be awful, it's usually good practice to match it.)

Ah, this reminded me to file #285 that I've had in my back burner for a while.

[cynthia]

abbreviations that are not acronyms or initialisms

Understood. (Abbreviation and acronym are the same word in my native tongue, in my defense.)