RFC: initialisms and FDP

[Simon L. Nielsen]

On 2004.07.15 07:17:09 +0000, Murray Stokely wrote:

> It would be really nice if we had some applications of all these
> <acronym> tags before spamming our SGML files with them.  I think it
> would be really cool if we had a mouse over rule for the HTML output
> to display the expanded form of the abbreviation.  Also, the first
> occurence in a file could point to the glossary as was mentioned.

That actually might be rather simple to do, by doing copy-paste of the
DSSSL code I made for the trademark stuff.

> Until we have some kind of application, I don't want to spend any time
> adding <acronym> tags.
> 
> How are mouseover's defined these days?  Is this standardized in CSS2
> or only a Javascript thing?  If it's in CSS2, then we could write some
> simple xsl code to make a pass through the docs and output some rules
> to append to docbook.css during the build.

It's actually defined (to a degree) in HTML 4.  The title attribute on
most tags can be used to create a single line mouseover text.
E.g. see the language selection on http://www.freebsd.org/.  If we
need multi-line I think it has to be done with JavaScript - at least I
couldn't find a proper way the last time I looked.

Of course there is also the HTML acronym tag (which might be named
something different but the idea is the same as the DocBook one) that
can be used.  In most browsers that renders to a dotted underlined
item which can be used to indicate an acronym and then the title
attribute can be used to actually get a mouseover explanation.

-- 
Simon L. Nielsen
FreeBSD Documentation Team
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