I was looking at specifications for an older Mac and saw that while there was less Random Access Memory (RAM), it had Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports but no High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) port. Maybe I can find a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to a spec Portable Document Format (PDF) or Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) download, if I can get past the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA).
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While Michale Schmitt’s reply is amusing enough, and I probably won’t be writing out RAM, USB, HDMI, or PDF in this forum, I agree with josehill that writing the first term followed by the abbreviation in parenthesis is a good practice.
Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV).
Kevin
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For what it’s worth (FWIW), as far as I know (AFAIK), if you know, you know (IYKYK).
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Thank you. I could not have explained that HDMI meant High-Definition Multimedia Interface, and I don’t believe I ever knew that CAPTCHA came from Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Perhaps you’ve helped others, too.
Similarly, I suspect that not many people know that an ATM machine is an automatic teller machine machine or that a PIN number is a personal identification number number, and spelling things out could help alleviate that nonsense.
And here are serious questions. How much time does a poster save by abbreviating something without explaining it even once compared to how much time two readers waste by trying to understand what the OP meant? Is the purpose of posting to show off one’s status of being “in the know” or to share information?
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I’m not sure the poster is contemplating the readers’ effort, nor perhaps should they.
That’s not all there is to it. How much time while reading do I waste trying to gloss beyond tedious explanations of acronyms most here are likely already well familiar with (like HDMI) — just go see how annoying it is to try to parse @mschmitt’s example. To use your parlance, is the purpose of posting to show off one’s ability to be verbose and/or link to Wikipedia?
Common sense once again comes to the rescue.
Explain unusual abbreviations the first time, but readily abbreviate what most here can be assumed to know. If on the rare occasion when somebody on a Mac-centric geek board doesn’t know what HDMI is, well they can go look it up, no harm no foul. No need to become tedious for all just because of an edge case.
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I remember once seeing a tech magazine story titled “The IP of IP.”
From the story it seemed likely that one of the IP’s meant “Intellectual Property” and the other was “Internet Protocol”
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While I agree, and do try to be as specific as possible, perhaps we can also agree to use the proper name for a product, such as Apple TV rather than MacTV?
Just looking at my post in that thread, the abbreviations that I used were “DNS”, “ISP”, and I guess “WiFi” is technically an abbreviation. Were any of those abbreviations that I should have spelled out? I really don’t think so - I think that those abbreviations are commonly known.
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Uness you actually mean the Macintosh TV.
… But when used, it should be hyphenated. E.g., “Wi-Fi”. See also Our Brands | Wi-Fi Alliance
Presumably the creation of a headline writer trying to be cute.
When writing technical papers (not many these days) I face the dilemma of whether to define abbreviations in the abstract or the introduction. As abstracts are supposed to stand on their own it is probably safer use the full term and not add an abbreviation. Generally guidelines for these papers don’t cover use of abbreviations. My general rule is to think of the reading audience and conservatively guess at abbreviations they should already know. There are examples for computer geeks above 
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Yep, Things like RAM, USB, HDMI, and CAPTCHA are far more familiar than their expansions, so spelling them out actually confuses users more.
A fair number of major corporations switched away from their full names to just their abbreviations over time for this reason.
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I’m totally appalled that they invoked Alan Turing in the CAPTCHA name…recognizing objects inside photos was NOT part of the original Turing Test.
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Wi-Fi (with or without a hyphen) Wi-Fi - Wikipedia is not an abbreviation. It is a complete term in itself for a network technology invented in Australia (so claim us Aussies) and patented by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) https://www.csiro.au. [In Australia, CSIRO would be recognised without explanation.] With a hyphen Wi-Fi now seems to be owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance https://www.wi-fi.org, whilst the CSIRO web site now claims it invented WiFi (without a hyphen) Bringing WiFi to the world - CSIRO, though the rest of Australia continues to call it Wi-Fi - e.g. the National Museum of Australia https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/wi-fi. What a tangled web we weave. 
I hope @Shamino will approve my use of links to expand on the definitions. 
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The Wi-Fi Alliance is a marketing/branding/industry lobby responsible for standardization, certification and licensing of Wi-Fi tech.
I consider them authoritative, because most products today carry the Alliance’s branding.
Of course, the actual standards belong to the IEEE, developed as a part of their 802.11 suite of radio protocols.
So you should be able to sell a wireless-LAN product compatible with the 802.11 standards without a license from the Wi-Fi Alliance, but you might not be able to call it “Wi-Fi” if you don’t pay for a license and pass their certification procedures.
Definitely.
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Likely, but unless to get past the chief editor liked they liked cute, the tone of the story could tolerate cute, and the editor in chief was in a good mood or had had a liquid lunch. :-)
Initialisms can get tricky. In journalism school in the 80s we were told some methods for this when writing for general audiences, ie first reference to something you want to initialise, spell it out and put the initialism in parentheses, thereafter use the initials.
Here we have a specialized audience so maybe this is a case for a shared text expansion file if there is such a thing, or encourage individual use by posters. I am sometimes in such a hurry to write a post that I do use my own initialisms without explaining. 
For New Scientist subscribers…
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