Re: abbrev/acronym expansion(amplification)

[Sam Steingold <sds@gnu.org>]

> * Michael Smith <fzvgu@kzy-qbp.bet> [2005-06-24 17:33:05 +0900]:
>
> Sam Steingold <sds@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> <acronym>FQDN<remark>Fully Qualified Domain Name</remark></acronym>
>> appears to be the only option (right?)
>
> If you use DocBook NG, you can do this:
>
>   <acronym>FQDN<alt>Fully Qualified Domain Name</alt></acronym>

this is nice, but <http://www.docbook.org/docbook-ng/index.html> says

     DocBook NG is re-implementation of DocBook in RELAX NG. It is just
     a “work-in-progress”. It validates a DocBook-like grammar that may,
     in some incarnation, form the basis for DocBook V5.x. Or it may
     not. At the moment, it's just an exploration by Norm. It has
     utterly no normative value at all.

I am not sure I want to switch to a "or it may not / just an exploration
/ no normative value" tool.
I am also not sure if my toolchain - onsgmls (no?), xsltproc (n/a?),
xmllint (yes) - supports schema.
(Although the apparent presence of EBNF is very tempting...)

> And note that DocBook NG lets you use the Alt element in many places,
> not just in Acroynym.

it looks like this "alt"/"title" notion is similar to the hard copy
notion of a footnote - a brief clarification which should not interrupt
the text flow.
maybe it would be a good idea to merge the "footnote" and the "alt"
elements.

> P.S. (Because somebody will probably ask...) Yeah, I know, it might
> seem better to have the DocBook <acronym> element transformed into the
> HTML <acronym> element rather than <span class="acronym">. The reason
> it is not done that way is this: For acronym, a template called
> "inline.charseq" gets called.  That same template gets called to
> render many other elements. In each case, it outputs <span
> class="foo">, where "foo" is the DocBook element name. The stylesheets
> do it that way because, from a development perspective, it's cleaner
> and easier to maintain.

except that it is wrong.
correctness comes before ease of maintenance.

the inline.charseq should accept an optional argument specifying the
top-level element (defaults to <span>),
and the acronym template will pass <acronym>.
(I am not sure if this is the right XSL terminology, but this is
certainly what I would do in lisp)

> Anyway, as far a HTML goes, <span class="acronym"> is for most (or
> all) intents and purpose functionally the same as <acronym>.

except that the default style is different.

Thanks for your reply!

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://www.podval.org/~sds) running w2k
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