Re: Acronyms in HTML

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 13:23:30 +0200
> From: Alper Ersoy <address@hidden>
> 
> 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.

This is okay, but for the issue you mention below:

> 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.

Right.  makeinfo was designed as a one-pass translator, so anything
that requires more than one pass is either impossible or requires
kludges (such as the contents placebo thingy to support @contents
that isn't at the end of the document).

> 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.

A very good idea, IMHO.