[Pmwiki-users] Re: markup musings - notation idea

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Sat May 22 08:03:15 CDT 2004


On Sat, May 22, 2004 at 02:13:25PM +0200, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> On Fri, 21 May 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> Ignoring the bizarre look, I think the fact that it will not be very
> common is a really good argument why it should use a more verbose markup,
> i.e. something like:
> 	[[acronym: W3C == World Wide Web Consortium]]
> This makes it clear in the markup that it's an accronym, and also allows 
> us to just as easily specify an abbreviation:
> 	[[abbreviation: e.g. == exempli gratia, meaning "for example"]]

...sigh... so, if we're going to introduce a bunch of tag-specific 
directives such as [[acronym:...]], [[abbr:...]]  [[figure:...]], 
why not just use the HTML directly?

   <acronym title='World Wide Web Consortium'>W3C</acronym>
   <img src='Attach:file.gif' alt='something else' />

The argument that we shouldn't use HTML because people wonder why
certain tags don't work also applies to defining new tags that replace
the HTML.  For example, if [[acronym:...]] and [[abbr:...]] are
introduced, I can see that people would begin to wonder why we don't have 
[[code:...]], [[kbd:...]], [[cite:...]].

> Furthermore, acronyms and abbreviations are not conceptually related to 
> links, so the fact that their HTML-elements have a title-element just like 
> an anchor element isn't a reason why their markup should be similar.

Good point.  OTOH, one reason why perhaps they should be similar is that
they are rendered similarly and have similar effects when used by user 
agents and other browsers.

My focus is that I really want to have a method for generating alt=
attributes in images.  The ability to use a similar syntax to generate 
title= attributes seems like it should be a natural extension, but to
me the ability to do alt= is far more important.

> PS. Should a definition of an acronym/abbreviation be "sticky", i.e. if I 
> write:
> 	The [[acronym: W3C == World Wide Web Consortium]] is responsible
> 	for many things. One of the things W3C does is to...
> should the second 'W3C' be rendered as an acronym?

I vote no.

> 	The [[acronym: W3C == World Wide Web Consortium]] is responsible
> 	for many things. One of the things [[acronym: W3C]] does is to...
> where writing '[[acronym: W3C]]' goes back and looks up the definition so 
> that you only have to specify it once.

Nice, but even here (as an author) I'd prefer using something shorter
for the second and subsequent W3C acronyms (something like [[|W3C]]).

Pm



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