If you've read the HTML specification recently trying to understand the difference between the abbr and acronym elements you may have come away feeling a little confused, I know I did. This article contains an explanation of the difference between the two tags, and when it is appropriate to use one or the other. The first element of business then is to explain what each of the words means, to do this I've enlisted the help of my trusty dictionary.
From the above definitions it is clear that an acronym is a particular class of abbreviation, abbreviation is the more general of the two. The HTML spec however is quite inconsistent in it's use of examples for these two elements.
The HTML 4.01 Specification (Section 9.2.1) states:
The ABBR and ACRONYM elements allow authors to clearly indicate occurrences of abbreviations and acronyms. Western languages make extensive use of acronyms such as "GmbH", "NATO", and "F.B.I.", as well as abbreviations like "M.", "Inc.", "et al.", "etc."
As can be seen the inconsistency between the W3's definition of an Acronym and the dictionary definition may be difficult to determine from the above text. To illuminate the matter a little more I'll add a few more definitions.
This now illuminates the inconsistency (between the spec's definition and the definition used in the English language) in the W3 specification. The specification gives examples of using the acronym tag with initialisms such as F.B.I. when the dictionary definition of an initialism clearly distinguishes it from an acronym.
<acronym title="Communist International">Commintern</acronym>
<acronym title="North Atlantic Treaty Organisation">NATO</acronym>
<abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets" class="initialism">CSS</abbr>
<abbr title="Hyper Text Mark-up Language" class="initialism">HTML</abbr>
<abbr title="Europe" class="truncation">Eur</abbr>
The classes are added to support styling of the elements using style sheets, they do not add any semantics in the same way, I have used meaningful names as they are useful from the authoring point of view.
acronym {speak : normal;}
abbr.initialism {speak : spell-out;}
abbr.truncation {speak : normal;}