Hi guys,
Mastercomputers just came up with two new cool BBCodes for Antilost - and I prompty adapted them for this board. They're ACRONYM and ABBR (Abbreviation). These are the two much needed and literally indispensible BBCodes for any technical board.

With ACRONYM you'll be able to write the acronym in your posts and link it with its full-form. Whenever you hover your mouse over the acronym, the full-form of the term pop's up around the mouse cursor.

The same goes for ABBR - but it's purpose is slightly different. It allows you to post abbreviated forms of words and hook up the unabbreviated form with it.

Examples:



Have fun & many thanks to MC,
m^e

Great thing, but I'm really not sure I see the difference. Both are used by typing [ codename = smth ] smth [ /codename ] and the effect is the same. Maybe my test exaple was wrong, but why are there two seperate codes?

Hey pyost,

First of all let me explain my intentions for this, both have different uses and are based off W3C's XHTML element tags.

The effects are the same, except their tag uses in XHTML are different. For acronym's from a web accessibility side of things, if you use a voice reader for websites the word is actually spoken as a whole or spoken character by character. The abbreviation however is read as a whole word.

The styling is kept similar as there's no need to differentiate what tag is what, as long as you understand that in this style, you can hover over it to understand what it means, no need to confuse them with two different looking formats, and I'm sure you'd be able to understand which is acronym and which is the abbreviation.

If you wanted to use a shorter version of a word, say no., then you can also provide the full word of what it means, mainly an accessibility issue really, but it's informative for people who don't know what you mean, especially if translating is required for those who are not english speakers. If I wanted to use initials like TV, then using the right method for it is beneficial for voice readers who may speak either the initials of the word or the whole word, depends on settings.

The tests are [ acronym=television ] TV [ /acronym] for initials and [ abbr=number ] no. [ /abbr ] for abbreviations, If uncertain of what to use, always use acronym because it can be handled both ways by being spelt out to the user or spoken the word in full. In which case it provides the user better understand. For us visual browser users though, it may seem irrelevant what means we use but if we get into more professional looking article formats (in which I'm deciding on how to create more BBCodes related to this) then by providing these means, we'll have better success with our readers who could have some disabilities as we are not detering them away because they can't make use of our resources we provide.


Cheers,


MC

Let's say I understood all of that But I think I'll stay away from these two codes..

I appreciate the new tags and you are right: I think they make a difference

For more professional articles, a reference/citation tag would be awfully nice. Basically they need to look like this [BLORK06] with a link to the full citation below. It is just an automated interior link with the link id as the abbreviation. With abbreviation or acronym, I can maybe get a bit closer.

[BLORK06] "Using Citatations in Astahost Articles". Bobby Blork. Non Existant Publications Weekly. Never-Never-Land. 2006

Also, would it be possible to have an upload feature where we can actually provide a subset of xhtml? It would be easy to check the subset against a DOM for proper use of tags, but the article can then be written offline. You can use a stylesheet to convert it for posting. I usually write mine offline anyway, but I then have it stored in my files in BBCode rather than something more useful. If I have it in xhtml (or heck, DocBook article format), it may be more useful to me down the road. Hmmm... I wonder if I can write a BBCode stylesheet for my DocBook articles...

Two more quick things:

1. I updated my Tutorial to use the new tags. One of the main effects is that there are now less abbreviations in my tutorial ;-)
2. Is there a list of the valid BBCodes for this board somewhere? I do not see it in the FAQs, Support, or Announcements.

I've never seen forum boards with this code. It may be a good idea to add two new buttons on the rich-text editor as peple may forgot about these new tags with time. Great work guys!

Hey evought,

We already share the same thoughts, I'm currently working on BBCodes to make articles/books, etc and referencing tags would definitely be in this, so far I'm looking at how the page will layout, what type of heading tags to have, separator tags, tags that you can use to bookmark within the document so that you can skip to parts of the article, table of contents, etc.

That's just for displaying in posts, other ideas outside of this is allow it to be converted into PDF, printable, opened in it's own separate window so you don't have to read other posts in the thread, using RSS for them and maybe indexing them all on one site categorised by what relevant topics they match so we can build an extensive knowledgebase.

The problem I face is that not everyone would have the time to make use of these tags, so I'm thinking of building a form that is easy to use and can be used to generate the relevant informformation, or I could create MS Word Templates/Open Office Templates that can help you do the process more easily. Whether I turn it into a BBCode formatted document or turn it into an XML document is still in the "should I" process.

Cheers,


MC

Look at http://xml.openoffice.org/xmerge/docbook/. There is a style template for producing DocBook articles in OpenOffice. Why invent when you can borrow? Let folks submit using DocBook (or subset) and use XSLT to convert and post. Myself, I prefer to use a decent text editor, but that is just me.

Excellent Mc.

SWIPER