Acronymity
| Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 | --Sean |
While writing some code tonight, I found myself trying to come up with an appropriate variable name for a relative representation of a URL that I was constructing, compared to the absolute URL that I eventually wanted to reference on the page. The acronym URI came to mind, which I was cool with until I realized that I didn't exactly know what URI stood for and would feel kind of silly if I got called on it by someone who did. But, hey, that's what search engines are for! Entering URI into my Firefox 2.0 search field, I got:
Which I thought was really handy, until I also realized that the string "URI" isn't at all present in "uniform resource identifier". I knew that we did internal string matching versus only prefixing for our suggestions, but expanding acronyms was something else altogether that blew my mind. I have no idea about the mechanics of how this works and we sadly don't have it as part of any of our web offerings any more, but it's really neat to be able to type acronyms like AJAX, IIRC, WYSIWYG, LOL, et cetera into the browser search box and have them be automatically demystified.