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Re: Lots of acronyms (Was: Nitpicky little style question)

Subject: Re: Lots of acronyms (Was: Nitpicky little style question)
From: "Ethan Metsger" <emetsger -at- obj-sys -dot- com>
To: "Jonathan West" <jwest -at- mvps -dot- org>, techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 11:23:37 -0500

On Wed, 13 Dec 2006 11:04:46 -0500, Jonathan West <jwest -at- mvps -dot- org> wrote:

Obviously, where the documentation is paper, not much can be done to help
the user understand the meaning of those terms except to provide an
excellent index and glossary. But for electronic documentation, in principle
every last occurrence of those defined terms and acronyms could be
hyperlinked back to where its meaning is defined, so the real meaning is no
more then a mouse click away.

Does anybody work with documentation that is like this, and do you make any
attempt to hyperlink acronyms and definitions?

My policy--and I'm not a professional at this--has always been to fully type out abbreviated phrases with the acronym parenthetically indicated, e.g., "Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS)."

A writer friend of mine expressed some frustration with hyperlinks in documents because they tended to distract the reader by creating the impression that the knowledge necessary for understanding was not immediately to hand.

Of course, HTML and other markup languages permit rather unobtrusive explanations by way of the <acronym> tag or by using the title element. In these cases, a quick mouseover is all that's required to obtain the definition.

Best,

Ethan Metsger
emetsger -at- obj-sys -dot- com; uppertank.net/ethanm/
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Lots of acronyms (Was: Nitpicky little style question): From: Jonathan West

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