It wasn't just fluff, it was actually misleading and wrong.
acronym should never be used - it is superseded by abbr, and only kept for backward-compatibility reasons. If you are going to use it, then it should be used for tagging acronyms. "Twitter" is not an acronym for "Founded in 2006".
Where's dl/dt/dd? Where are the labels for the radio buttons?
Let's say that there was an article saying that C++ is a great language because it supports templates, so you can easily customize your blog style with it.
That's so far beyond wrong, I'd consider it spam. This is the HTML version of that error.
The fact that they're both in the spec (as I said, for backward-compatibility reasons) does not mean that they're both useful.
There is a dead horse that the web development community has been beating for ages, as to what exactly is the difference between an ABBR and an ACRONYM, and if there even is a difference. http://tinyurl.com/d9vngz Is HTML an acronym, or an abbreviation? HyperText is one word, so it's not an initialism like FBI. What about radar or Nabisco, or other words that were once acrobrevinitialisms but are now treated just like regular words?
The general consensus seems to be: every acronym is an abbr, but not every abbr is an acronym; IE6 supports acronym and not abbr; but abbr is better supported by JAWS and other screen readers, and is supported by IE7+ and the other major browsers. Therefor, abbr is always at least as semantically appropriate as acronym, and better serves the people that the tag is designed to serve. Use abbr, and avoid acronym.
The HTML spec only one definition of the language; it says little to nothing about best practices or trade-offs in using various tags.
I agree with IsaacSchlueter's comments, some of the examples/explanations given are just incorrect.
<address> is supposed to be used only to signify the address of the author of the current page, not any address. The <cite> example doesn't really make any sense, as he doesn't actually have any quotation to cite. And Twitter is an acronym for "Founded in 2006"? What?
I use <abbr> for parenthetical remarks (that is, these) when I write. Is that acceptable usage? I would have rendered the line above, on my blog, as:
I use <abbr> for <abbr title="these">parenthetical remarks</abbr> when I write.
Having found that well-written anchor text just flows as part of the body of a document, the link itself becoming invisible if you were to reformat the text to remove it, I tried the same thing with parentheticals. So far, I think it's worked wonders for my writing. Anything I want to say that's orthogonal to the main point, but still interesting, can still be there in a sort of "director's cut" view, but instead of having all my extra clippings forced upon you, you have to decide to look.
If that isn't proper, I hope there's an <aside> tag in some upcoming version of HTML; it's at about the same "semantic" level as <q>.
<abbr> would be incorrect for this usage. You could, perhaps, stretch the use case of the "i" element (not "em"), though a simple span would probably be the way to go.
You can also use <span class="aside" title="these">parenthetical remarks</span>. Title works on all elements and is actually quite a nice thing to have :)
acronym should never be used - it is superseded by abbr, and only kept for backward-compatibility reasons. If you are going to use it, then it should be used for tagging acronyms. "Twitter" is not an acronym for "Founded in 2006".
Where's dl/dt/dd? Where are the labels for the radio buttons?
Flagged.