Acronyms and Abbreviations

["Colin Shapiro" <cmshapiro@gmail.com>]

I've always been tagging all of my acronyms and abbreviations with the proper DocBook elements, simply because it seemed to me that it was standard practice to do so when I first got started.

Now, however, I'm beginning to wonder why I keep doing this.  When I'm writing the type of technical documentation that I do (which is mainly hardware manuals), I tend to use *a lot* of acronyms and abbreviations, and I'm beginning to think that tagging them all is just adding unnecessary work, since I never do anything special with these elements when formatting/transforming my documents.

So, my question is this: should I bother using elements such as these that I don't really need?  It would seem that

    The <acronym>CPU</acronym> runs at 2.0 <abbrev>GHz</abbrev>

is superfluous if I don't ever use Acronym and Abbrev for anything.

- Colin