Re: [docbook-tc] acronym title?

[Michael Smith <smith@xml-doc.org>]

Bob Stayton <bobs@caldera.com> writes:

> On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 01:11:16AM +0200, Oleg Tkachenko wrote:
> > Hello!
> > 
> > How can I get <acronym> element to be in html like a real html
> > acronym, e.g. <acronym title="Document Object Model">DOM</acronym>?
> >  --- Oleg Tkachenko, Multiconn International, Israel
>
> This was an interesting request.  Is there any mechanism
> in DocBook to associate a full title with its acronym?
> Seems like a logical thing to do.

On the presentation side in particular, for any Acronym and Abbrev
you'd like to have appear as "normal" text in rendered output, having
a standard way to associate it with a "spelled out" phrase would make
it possible for the stylesheets to transform the DocBook source in
such a way that the spelled-out text shows up as pop-up/tooltip/alt
text in rendered output for the Acronym/Abbrev.

And it might also be good to have a way to do the converse: to have
phrases-that-can-be-abbreviated show up normally in rendered output,
with their associated acronyms/abbreviations available as the
annotations -- pop-up/tooltip/alt text -- instead.

I guess the HTML "title" attribute -- as Oleg uses it in his example--
is the standard HTML place to put that kind of annotative text to make
it appear as pop-up/tooltip text (in Explorer and Mozilla at least).
But you can also generate some Javascript or whatever to get better
annotation pop-ups (with character formatting, links, and images and
such in them). And you can have pop-up annotations in PDFs too.

  --Mike

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