Mouseover definitions for acronyms (was Re: RFC: initialisms and FDP)

Marc Fonvieille blackend at FreeBSD.org
Sun Jul 18 10:02:29 UTC 2004


On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 08:33:33AM +0000, Murray Stokely wrote:
> Ok this is working now.  Thanks to Simon for explaining how to do the
> mouseovers in HTML4.  I think that the little dotted underlines will
> get distracting in a chapter filled with acronyms.
> 
> For the advanced networking chapter anyway, it might look best if the
> first occurence of an acronym is rendered with a link to the glossary,
> and the first three are rendered with the mouseover.
> 
> I'm not really sure, it's largely up to individual sense of
> aesthetic.  What do others think?
> 
[...]

Well for me "it looks weird", I mean I see too much dotted underlines :)
just look at the 23.4.2 section for example... or some titles.  Many
different acronyms in one text could lead to something "difficult" to
read.
I think rendering the first three ones should be enough, if one needs to
know the meaning of NIS, it's at the beginning of the text not at the
end.

Now an "innocent" question: if we use first four acronyms (1 for the
glossary, the rest for the mouseover thing), do we need to tag the
remaining ones (with an entity or <acronym> tags)?  I'm thinking about a
section not a whole chapter.

Marc



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