Mouseover definitions for acronyms (was Re: RFC: initialisms and FDP)

[Simon L. Nielsen]

On 2004.07.18 12:02:25 +0200, Marc Fonvieille wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 08:33:33AM +0000, Murray Stokely wrote:
> > Ok this is working now.  Thanks to Simon for explaining how to do the
> > mouseovers in HTML4.  I think that the little dotted underlines will
> > get distracting in a chapter filled with acronyms.
> > 
> > For the advanced networking chapter anyway, it might look best if the
> > first occurence of an acronym is rendered with a link to the glossary,
> > and the first three are rendered with the mouseover.
> > 
> > I'm not really sure, it's largely up to individual sense of
> > aesthetic.  What do others think?
> > 
> [...]
> 
> Well for me "it looks weird", I mean I see too much dotted underlines :)

Yes, I think the dotted lines should just be removed from the output
with the CSS stylesheet.  For our use, I just find it distracting.

> just look at the 23.4.2 section for example... or some titles.  Many
> different acronyms in one text could lead to something "difficult" to
> read.
> I think rendering the first three ones should be enough, if one needs to
> know the meaning of NIS, it's at the beginning of the text not at the
> end.
>
> Now an "innocent" question: if we use first four acronyms (1 for the
> glossary, the rest for the mouseover thing), do we need to tag the
> remaining ones (with an entity or <acronym> tags)?  I'm thinking about a
> section not a whole chapter.

How about this: The first instance is expanded to (random example)
"FTP (File Transfer Protocol)" where some part is a link to the
glossary, if there is an entry.  All other instances a marked up using
the HTML <acronym> tag with a title attribute, but we don't show
underlines.  Then it's not distracting, and if the reader moves the
mouse over the word it's expandend.  Doing something special for the
first three seems a bit odd to me.

How many tags we mark up with DocBook <acronym> is then another
matter... I think that would should mark up the first couple (at
least) so you will get the expansion and mouseover on some.  With the
redering I described before I think it would be prefered if all
instances were marked up, but I don't think it's worth the CVS/SGML
bloat.

BTW, I actually have the DSSSL code to do most of what I describe
above - I'm just working on code to link to the Glossary.. It's a bit
more tricky since I have to check if a acronym is described in the
Glossary first...

-- 
Simon L. Nielsen
FreeBSD Documentation Team
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