acronyms, abbreviations, definitions

[Nathalie Sequeira <n@n-faktor.net>]

Hello list!

1. I'm  a bit insecure on how to mark up inline acronyms & 
abbbreviations in docBook.
Coming from XHTML, I was expecting an attribute that can contain their 
written-out counterparts, somewhat like
<abbr title="United Nations">UN</abbr>
but cannot find a similar mechanism in the docBook 5 online reference.

Is there any "standard" way of including this essential information?
Or should we do something like
<abbreviation>UN<phrase>United Nations</phrase></abbreviation>
and let XSL transformation deal with the <phrase/> (or is another 
element semantically more adequate?), either setting it in parentheses 
inline, creating a linked list of glossary terms at the end of the text 
(e.g. for PDF output) or transforming into HTML attributes in HTML output?

2. Is there an element that is suited for inline definitions (I haven't 
found any obvious choice and am quite lost on how to get this done...)?

Thanks for any thoughts on this!
Nathalie Sequeira