Simon Willison’s Weblog

Acrobot

23rd April 2003

Ian Lloyd has a very neat new tool on Accessify: Acrobot, an abbreviation and acronym generator. It takes a chunk of text and wraps any recognised abbreviations or acronyms in the appropriate tag, with the expanded term as the title (it can also optionally just use IE friendly acronyms). It shames me to say that after a good 6 months of using these tags I’m still doing them by hand, so Acrobot is just what I need (at least until I get something similar working in my blogging system). Registered Accessify members can expand the tool’s dictionary, so maybe I’ll have to bite the bullet and sign up for yet another web site account...

A suggestion: How about making the dictionary (already available in table form) available in some kind of easily parsable format (comma delimited, tab seperated or XML) so people constructing their own tools can use it instead of building their own?

Bug report: While I didn’t manage to catch it out with pre-marked-up acronyms, the XML) in the above wasn’t converted.