Abbreviations (and acronyms)

I’d rather see a syntax that expands on the link and image syntax:

reusing * from above it would make more sense to me to use a syntax along the lines of:

*[HTML](Hyper Text Markup Language) is awesome!

or

*[HTML][1] is awesome

[1]: Hyper Text Markup Language

As far as the flag used for marking abbreviations, I think an asterisk is a poor choice with it already being used for em and strong. I’d prefer the question mark because it’s common for abbr elements to be styled with cursor: help.

?[HTML][1] is awesome

[1]: Hyper Text Markup Language

As far as authoring is concerned. I rarely ever find a need for the abbr tag. Typically content editors do what newspapers and magazines do and define the abbreviation the first time it’s used:

A good example of this is the wikipedia article on HTML

HyperText Markup Language, commonly referred to as HTML, is the standard markup language used to create web pages. It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags enclosed in angle brackets (like <html>).

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