http://norman.walsh.name/2004/09/10/annotations 7 162 2004-09-10T09:15:59-04:00 $Date: 2005-10-17 09:59:18 -0400 (Mon, 17 Oct 2005) $ Norman Walsh 2004 Norman Walsh The DocBook TC has been talking about annotations for a while now. Herewith a few random thoughts and a little bit of experimental implementation. Charles Dickens When found, make a note of. The DocBook TCTechnical Committee has been talking about annotations for a while now. The genesis of this discussion is two separate but similar requests: Support for acronym expansion (such as American National Standard Code for Information InterchangeASCII and Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange CodeEBCDIC) and Support for titles on links (such as SunSun Microsystems) First, although HTML uses attributes for the simple inline annotations demonstrated above, we want to use elements. Putting human readable content in attributes is wrong (it doesn’t support the full range of text that you might want to use and it doesn’t internationalize well). Present a bunch of engineers with a problem and what’s one of the first things we do? We generalize. There are a lot of issues around annotations, technical and otherwise, that have to do with just how far we want to take this generalization. Once you’ve got the stuff in elements, it’s a short step from inline annotations to more interesting flavors. Modern browsers display acronym expansions and link titles as “tool tips”. That little graphic after the phrase “tool tips” is a “block” annotation. In a modern, graphical browser clicking on that link will present a “popup window”. That works in Firefox and Internet Explorer and sortof in Opera and sortof in Safari. In Opera, you have to click twice on the graphic sometimes, but maybe that’s because I have an antique version of Opera. In Safari, the popups don’t seem to go away when you click somewhere else in the window; you have to reload the page to get rid of them. That’s unfortunate. A tool tip is a word or short phrase displayed automatically by an application when the user hovers the mouse over some component in the user interface. I’m using Matt Kruse ’s PopupWindow code. For the moment, I’m going to assume that technical glitches with specific browsers are just that, technical glitches, and I’m not going to worry about it too much. With a little CSS cleverness, text-only browsers like links and lynx work OK too. I hope that means screen readers work too. What happens is, the block annotations appear at the bottom of the page and the graphic’s alternate text becomes a hypertext link to those annotations. Maybe it’s a little cluttered, what with the “X” alternate text for the close button and all, but it seems like a fair compromise. At the moment, I’m only supporting two classes of annotations: Inline annotations are recognized in abbrev and link elements and produce an appropriate HTML tool tip. Only the first inline annotation is recognized, the rest are ignored. Block annotations are recognized in most places and produce the little clickable graphic that makes the popup window. One of the open questions with annotation support is what, if any, rendering should be used for print (or non-interactive) presentation. I’m using footnotes at the moment, with a distinct footnote mark, for block annotations. Inline annotations are ignored. Comments? Suggestions?