Asterisk conflicts with ABBR and ACRONYM tags

[Erin Paseka]

I'd noticed that ABBRs and ACRONYMs resembled a link that ought to go somewhere, so in Tuesday's meeting I was glad to see the change to asterisks.

Then today I realized this makes my pages confusing. I have both ABBR tags and asterisks (for the usual "see note below" implication) on many pages, often on the same word. Now a note like "* Also offered online" on our Business summary appears applicable to all the ABBReviated degrees listed above, and it's false advertising.

Examples (see "Graduate Degrees Offered")
http://www.unl.edu/gradstudies/prospect ... Engr.shtml
http://www.unl.edu/gradstudies/prospect ... ness.shtml

Anybody else having asterisk conflicts? Anybody know a smart way around this?

[nhummel]

I'd noticed that ABBRs and ACRONYMs resembled a link that ought to go somewhere, so in Tuesday's meeting I was glad to see the change to asterisks.

Then today I realized this makes my pages confusing. I have both ABBR tags and asterisks (for the usual "see note below" implication) on many pages, often on the same word. Now a note like "* Also offered online" on our Business summary appears applicable to all the ABBReviated degrees listed above, and it's false advertising.

Sorry about that. This didn't cross my mind when trying to fix the problem that abbr and acronym looked like links. I guess I use superscripts 1,2, ... for footnotes, if I need them (or at least I think I do).

At this point the easiest solution would be changing the new css to something else. That way people don't have to fix their code.

How about changing the abbr and acronym css to a ? from a * ?

Suggestions on other symbols to use?

Ned

[Erin Paseka]

The question mark might work if we could make it distinct enough (small, superscript, different color?) to not be mistaken for part of a sentence. Otherwise we'd risk turning statements into questions. "Dr. X has a Ph.D.?." "We love the WDN?!"

What about styling the tagged text rather than inserting characters? Maybe color the text blue or green, or add a red underline (background image)?

[Erin Paseka]

FYI, I'm doing a temporary override to mark most of my ABBRs with little red question marks instead of asterisks. This is just a short-term fix to avoid a bunch of confused calls/emails while we're figuring out what to do.

Meanwhile, I've discovered that these inserted characters scoot all the way to the left in Opera. Changing float:left to float:none seems to fix that.

[saltybeagle]

When I mark something which has a footnote or extra text I usually use numerical footnote markers, usually within brackets [1]... superscript also works, but I think this is the prevalent method used in books to denote a citation or additional text related to a word. One benefit is that you can include any number of footnotes, unlike with a simple asterisk *, or **