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Linked acronyms...

Posted: Mon Oct 07, 2002 9:57 am
by nielsene
I've taken to the practice of using acronym tags to provide the full expansion of acronyms and abbreviations on my pages. Typically speaking I definately like the affect. However, in many case the acronym is the name of an organization, that I'ld also like to link to. Nesting link/acronym tags doesn't produce very satisfactory results, using just the title field of the link also isn't exactly nice as it looses the contextual markup of the acronym. (I'm thinking of writing a script to pull all acronyms out to a seperate glossory page, so I like having teh acronymn tags there...)

Has anyone found any good solutions to this problem?

Current solutions I'm considering:
using a "a acronym" selector to turn off most of the formatting of the acronym inside a link, but retain the title within the acronym tag

using CSS2 to make generated content, maybe a superscripted [?] as the acronym expansion

Your thoughts?

[example page at http://compinabox.sourceforge.net. YCN, USABDA, and NDCA should all be linked as well as acronyms. The intial CIB does not need a link as it would simply link back to this page.]

Posted: Mon Oct 07, 2002 10:35 am
by mydimension
here is how http://www.w3.org does it:

Code: Select all

<a href="Style/CSS/" class="navlink"><acronym title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</acronym></a>
however it sounds like you don't like the double underline that produces so this may work:

Code: Select all

CSS
a acronym &#123;
    text-decoration: none;
    border: 0px; /* i think this is what causes the underline so remove it */
&#125;
while the generated content would be cool, IE does not support it yet so keep that in mind.

Posted: Mon Oct 07, 2002 10:44 am
by nielsene
Yeah that was the approach I was thinking of taking, unfortunately IE seems to take quite a while on some browsers to pop up the explanation float and without some context clue that it exists I doubt people would wait long enough. (I've it take about 2-3 seconds of hover time to provide the expansion.) A "normal" acronym on my site has both the dotted underline and a help cursor (as suggested in an ALA's article), which I think lets people know that there is additional information present.

But I guess its better than not linking them, as I'm doing now....