Hi,
If you are using DocBook 5, you could use an <annotation> element to contain the hover
title. You would need to write the XSL customization to process the annotation, of
course. See this reference for more info:
http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Db5Tools.html#Db5Annotations
Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jennifer Moore" <>
To: "DocBook Apps" <>
Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2010 12:41 PM
Subject: [docbook-apps] Footnote title tags / visual classification
> Hello all
>
> I'm pondering how footnotes appear in HTML.
>
> Some footnotes are just a reference to a source, whereas others include further
> material, e.g. a discussion which wasn't quite on-topic enough to make it into the
> main text.
>
> A while back, I was reading a (printed) book where the formatting of inline footnote
> numbers differed for the two different kinds: they had the "further discussion"
> type in bold, and the refs non-bold. I thought this was ingenious and useful,
> because in most books I _do_ want to read the side discussions, whereas I usually
> _don't_ need to see the refs.
>
> Well, this got me thinking. In HTML it should be possible to go one better than
> that, and use a revealed-on-hover "link title" to give a clue about what's at the
> other end of the footnote link. So the reader could hover over the link and see
> e.g. "Footnote: Discussion of [whatever]" or "Footnote: Source ref only", or however
> I had described it in the XML tag. So they'd know whether they wanted to bother
> clicking on it.
>
> Obviously I could already put title tags into my HTML manually after the XML->HTML
> transform - but I think it would be better if they could go into the original XML,
> which I consider the definitive version. So I'm wondering if it's possible. & I
> thought before I launch into trying to implement any of it myself I would confer :-)
>
> Questions:
>
> 1. Is there anything like this built in somewhere already? I'm guessing not,
> because I've just read the Footnotes chapter in Bob's XSL book and not seen it.
>
> 2. Has anyone else already done a customisation along these lines, or something
> similar?
>
> 3. I see that footnotes can have an attribute "xreflabel", "text to be used when a
> cross reference (XRef) is made to the element". I'm not using xref here, so could I
> (mis)use xreflabel to hold the title? and then change the XSL to use that and make
> it into a HTML link title?
>
> Or, could I use "role" to hold the title? (though that seems less semantically
> appropriate.)
>
> I've seen in other contexts (e.g. <para>) that a "role" attribute gets rendered as a
> CSS class (v useful), but this doesn't seem to be happening by default here (perhaps
> because the class is already "footnote"). If it did, I could use that to toggle
> bold on & off in CSS (e.g. role="comment" vs role="source" & classes created
> accordingly).
>
> However, in HTML, given the choice of one or the other I'd _rather_ have a hoverable
> title than a formatting class.
>
> 4. Or would it a bad idea for some reason I haven't thought of?
>
> That's about as far as I've got. Comments very welcome!
>
> thanks
>
> Jennifer
>
> --
> www.uncharted-worlds.org/blog/
>
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