RE: [docbook-apps] acronyms, abbreviations, definitions

["Cramer, David W (David)" <dcramer@motive.com>]

> > > But this isn't a glossary entry Larry? It's semantically wrong
> IMHO.
> > > DaveP
> >
> > Really? You come across
> > "<glossterm><acronym>TLA</acronym></glossterm>" in a document and
> > don't know what "TLA" means...
> 
> OK, I'll play dumb.
> I want to use acronym, with an expansion, in a para David.
> The fact that it's an acronym in a glossary is of little use to me
> and any blind user having the text read to him/her?
> 
> OK. RFE submitted.

My understanding of Larry's suggestion is that the OP customize the stylesheets so that acronyms and abbreviations (only the first instance in a book or the first instance in a chunk in html) contain the appropriate stuff in the result. The data regarding the expanded form is stored in the master glossary. The stylesheets do the work of looking it up and supplying the appropriate markup in the output. In pdf, the stylesheets expand the first occurrence of "<glossterm linkend="tla.glossary"><abbrev>TLA</abbrev></glossterm>" to "TLA (Three Letter Abbreviation)" (maybe with a hyperlink to the glossary for online users) and add the term to the <glossary>. In chunked html, the stylesheets do whatever is going to make screen readers happy or is going to meet your needs for a given context (e.g. tooltip definitions for sighted users). The main suggestion is that instead of storing the expanded form in each abbrev/acronym in the source, you store it in one place. Ideally, in your authoring environment you would also provide a convenient way for writers to add entries from the master glossary.

So I don't think there's really any disagreement. This is more a suggestion of how to manage the information on the source side, not anything about the details of what you should do on the output side. 

David