Re: [docbook-tc] acronym title?

[Bob Stayton <bobs@caldera.com>]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 11:38:18AM -0600, Michael Smith wrote:
> 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


> [And this from Norm on the DOCBOOK-APPS list:]
 
> There's no easy, inline way. The problem with the title attribute is that
> it doesn't work in an I18N way (you couldn't put BIDI or Ruby in there, or
> even other markup like <emphasis>).
> 
> A subelement inside acronym for this purpose doesn't seem very inviting.
> 
> If the acronyms are in a glossary, I suppose I'd do some fancy hackery to
> make that work.
> 
> It's definitely a nice idea, but no good, general solutions spring to
> mind.
 
My initial reaction was some sort of attribute on acronym
with a title string in it.  But the DocBook acronym content model
is pretty complex mixed content (including other
acronyms).  As Norm points out, it is unlikely the expansion
of the acronym would be less complex.

Another possibility is putting the information
"out-of-line", like a footnote reference.  It could be a
separate <acronymtitle> element with a similar content
model.  Connect them with an ID/IDREF.  By default,
<acronymtitle> would not be output inline, so you could put
it next to the first use of your acronym.
But the information could be collected for a
back matter acronym lookup list, if someone wanted that
option.

But given that acronym already has a complex content model,
I'm not clear why putting acronymtitle as a subelement to
acronym wouldn't work even better.  It achieves the same
association and skips the ID/IDREF.  A stylesheet could do
what a lot of house styles call for, which is printing
the "Full Title Here (FTH)" if it is present.


Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
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                                            email: bobs@caldera.com