Before we get on to the main topic of this article, please tolerate a few paragraphs where briefly I indulge in my love of the spoken word, also sharing my bemusement with the use and misuse of acronyms.

Apart from the massive proliferation of the architectural standards and protocols themselves, we're faced with other problems such as the flood of buzzwords and acronyms that we have somehow to cope with. Apart from their sheer volume and complexity, we have to deal with confusion and obfuscations.

For example, in some IT discussion contexts, the acronym "IP" could possibly be interpreted as "intellectual property" rather than as "Internet protocol" (think, the copyright terms and conditions section of the license for a communications product that uses TCP/IP). And does SDLC stand for "Synchronous Data Link Control" or "software development life cycle?" (Probably the latter, since SDLC is part of SNA, which we've already seen is rarely referred to these days.)

Another challenge for us is the unintended or even deliberate morphing of meaning of particular acronyms. Just one example of this is SOAP, as described by Wikipedia: "SOAP once stood for 'Simple Object Access Protocol' but this acronym was dropped with Version 1.2 of the standard, as it was considered to be misleading. Version 1.2 became a W3C Recommendation on June 24, 2003. The acronym is sometimes confused with SOA, or Service-oriented architecture; however SOAP is quite different from SOA."

Hey, there's another perverse sort of behavior with which we have to cope. You noticed it, didn't you? I'm referring, of course, to the casually-dropped acronym W3C which stands for "World Wide Web Consortium."

If it slipped by you unnoticed, I can only gather that you've become drugged, insensitive and totally inured to the curse of what I call acronymphomania!

So we now have names like SOAP and ISO which look like acronyms but aren't, because the letters don't stand for the initials of any words. Wow!

Then there are such puzzling beauties as i18n and Big-endian (the latter has nothing to do with corpulence, I hasten to point out). And don't even get me started on the subject of recursive acronyms, not to mention nested acronyms (two or even three levels deep), and more.

I know I'm not alone in my views. See what the folks over at Coding Horror have to say about this in Don't Acronymize Your Users. By the way, this led me to How Many Dots Has It Got which explains screen resolutions (such as WSXGA+) and calls them mnemonics rather than acronyms, but I think that's strictly only the case if the acronym was created as a memory aid not just a convenient abbreviation.

Okay, you'll be glad to know that I'm finished with the waffle about words and acronyms, so let's proceed to some real stuff.

PLEASE READ ON...