Re: Acronyms in HTML

[Alper Ersoy]

Hi!

Eli Zaretskii:
> But I certainly wouldn't want this same footnote to be generated in
> all the other places where I use this acronym: if nothing else, this
> would be ugly, e.g. imagine a page where this acronym is used 5 times.

Ah, I see.  Following your explanation (and considering Karl's
opposition to footnotes in general -- which I believe is because they
break the flow of the text), how about the following:

  Texinfo portion:

    makeinfo --xml generates @acronym{XML, eXtensible Markup Language}
    documents.

  Info and TeX:

    makeinfo --xml generates XML (eXtensible Markup Language)
    documents.

  HTML:

    makeinfo --xml generates <acronym>XML</acronym> (eXtensible Markup
    Language) documents.

After that use of @acronym{}, if one uses it again with only one
argument:

  Texinfo portion:

    @acronym{XML} output is an alternative representation of Texinfo
    documents.

  Info and TeX:

    XML output is an alternative representation of Texinfo documents.

  HTML:

    <acronym title="eXtensible Markup Language">XML</acronym> output
    is an alternative representation of Texinfo documents.

So, this way we give the authors the control of where the acronym
expansion appears in the body of the text, and make use of the title
attribute.

(The reason I omitted title attribute from the first HTML output is
because, text only browsers omit it, so the expansion in parentheses
is necessary.  And both of them at the same time is a bit redundant.)

However, there's a problem with this approach too.  Acronyms preceding
the one with the title option will not have a title attribute with
HTML output.  This can be considered as an inconsistency.

By the way, I have a couple of books with an ``Acronyms Used in This
Book'' section.  It may be nice to give the authors an easy way to
create such a section, ie. with a @listofacronyms command.

Thanks,

-- 
Alper Ersoy