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

[Christian Ridderström]

On Fri, 21 May 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> However, the markup is remarkably clean related to the other
> proposals I've seen, so perhaps the (bizarre) solution is to
> use an empty target to indicate abbreviations.  Thus the markup 
> would be
> 
>    [[|W3C || World Wide Web Consortium]]
> 
> Note the leading pipe.  I admit this looks really bizarre,
> but it's entirely consistent with the general case, and building
> acronyms is not something I expect to be commonly performed in
> the markup anyway.

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"]]

(The purpose of this difference would be to help indicate how it should 
be pronounced).

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.

/Christian

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 think having this happen automatically would be annoying, but the
following alternative might be useful:

	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.

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m                           http://www.md.kth.se/~chr