Hacker News Reader

HTTP and JSON may count as "really really basic" to you and BGP may not, but I worked on BGP years before I ever touched HTTP or JSON so the opposite would be true for me. People from different backgrounds are familiar with different acronyms and as a result different acronyms are assumed to be known in different contexts. Don't assume your experience to be universal.

View on HN

It is good form in technical writing (or any writing, really), to define your acronyms the first time they are used. For example, this would have been helpful:

"GoBGP is an open source Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) implementation..."

Writers should never assume that knowledge of an acronym is universal.

Would you post something like "go-json is an go implementation of JavaScript Object Notation"? Or "Nginx is an Hypertext Transfer Protocol Server"? Please.... It is not that hard to search for "BGP" on the web.

Maybe so, but I wrote about mixing acronyms towards the end of this post: <http://boston.conman.org/2003/11/19.2>, where IRA can stand for one of three different things. My solution: use use <abbr> (<acronym> seems to be deprecated these days).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com