Re: [docbook-apps] Footnote title tags / visual classification

["Bob Stayton" <bobs@sagehill.net>]

Hi,
If you are using DocBook 5, you could use an <annotation> element to contain the hover 
title.  You would need to write the XSL customization to process the annotation, of 
course.  See this reference for more info:

http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Db5Tools.html#Db5Annotations

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@sagehill.net


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jennifer Moore" <jennifer@uncharted-worlds.org>
To: "DocBook Apps" <docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2010 12:41 PM
Subject: [docbook-apps] Footnote title tags / visual classification


> Hello all
>
> I'm pondering how footnotes appear in HTML.
>
> Some footnotes are just a reference to a source, whereas others include further 
> material, e.g. a discussion which wasn't quite on-topic enough to make it into the 
> main text.
>
> A while back, I was reading a (printed) book where the formatting of inline footnote 
> numbers differed for the two different kinds:  they had the "further discussion" 
> type in bold, and the refs non-bold.  I thought this was ingenious and useful, 
> because in most books I _do_ want to read the side discussions, whereas I usually 
> _don't_ need to see the refs.
>
> Well, this got me thinking.  In HTML it should be possible to go one better than 
> that, and use a revealed-on-hover "link title" to give a clue about what's at the 
> other end of the footnote link.  So the reader could hover over the link and see 
> e.g. "Footnote: Discussion of [whatever]" or "Footnote: Source ref only", or however 
> I had described it in the XML tag.  So they'd know whether they wanted to bother 
> clicking on it.
>
> Obviously I could already put title tags into my HTML manually after the XML->HTML 
> transform - but I think it would be better if they could go into the original XML, 
> which I consider the definitive version.  So I'm wondering if it's possible.  & I 
> thought before I launch into trying to implement any of it myself I would confer :-)
>
> Questions:
>
> 1.  Is there anything like this built in somewhere already?  I'm guessing not, 
> because I've just read the Footnotes chapter in Bob's XSL book and not seen it.
>
> 2.  Has anyone else already done a customisation along these lines, or something 
> similar?
>
> 3.  I see that footnotes can have an attribute "xreflabel", "text to be used when a 
> cross reference (XRef) is made to the element".  I'm not using xref here, so could I 
> (mis)use xreflabel to hold the title?  and then change the XSL to use that and make 
> it into a HTML link title?
>
> Or, could I use "role" to hold the title?  (though that seems less semantically 
> appropriate.)
>
> I've seen in other contexts (e.g. <para>) that a "role" attribute gets rendered as a 
> CSS class (v useful), but this doesn't seem to be happening by default here (perhaps 
> because the class is already "footnote").  If it did, I could use that to toggle 
> bold on & off in CSS (e.g. role="comment" vs role="source" & classes created 
> accordingly).
>
> However, in HTML, given the choice of one or the other I'd _rather_ have a hoverable 
> title than a formatting class.
>
> 4.  Or would it a bad idea for some reason I haven't thought of?
>
> That's about as far as I've got.  Comments very welcome!
>
> thanks
>
> Jennifer
>
> -- 
> www.uncharted-worlds.org/blog/
>
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