remove Acronyms plugin?

[Glen Mazza <gl...@gmail.com>]

Hi Team, with our recent upgrade to HTML 5, the AcronymsPlugin created 
by Jaap van der Molen in 2004 is obsolete, as acronym tags are not 
supported in HTML5 (http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_acronym.asp).  The 
HTML 5 equivalent, <abbr/> is quite nice 
(http://camendesign.com/code/using-abbr), and it would be trivial to 
convert the AcronymsPlugin to it, but I'm not sure enough % of people 
would use this plugin to warrant maintaining it.  For people who care 
about adding abbr tags to their text, they are hard to automate because 
sometimes you want the abbreviation and sometimes you don't, the 
abbreviation value changes depending on context, etc., and this plugin 
does a one-size-fits-all.

 From the blog article linked above, the purpose of the <abbr/> tag is 
to provide alternative spoken text in cases where the written is 
different from how you would speak it.  Examples given:  i.e. --> in 
other words; vs. --> versus; CSS --> style sheet, != --> does not equal.

This is how an <abbr/> tag looks:

|<abbr title="style sheet">CSS</abbr>

|

Which makes it of comparable complexity to an anchor tag:

<a href="www.wikipedia.org>Wikipedia</a>

I'm inclined to remove this plugin, but will happily accept its 
restoration as an AbbrPlugin if someone in the community supplies a 
patch for it (indicating that at least someone is using it.)  Since 
we've never had a demand for an AnchorPlugin for anchor tags which are 
far more prolific and therefore much more of a time-saver than an 
AbbrPlugin would be, I think it would follow that we don't need an 
AbbrPlugin either.  WDYT?

Regards,
Glen