Disclaimer: I would like to stress that I believe the glossary to be a very
central and important part of the course. Especially the automatic markup
facility promises to become a great tool. I would like to throw in a
critique, though:
After marking up my HTML, I realized that each and every instance of a term
that exists in the glossary is crossreferenced to it.
However, it is my opinion that this should actually only be done once per
document or perhaps once per section. This is what we generally do in
conventional scientific papers. The reason for this is that too many
explanatory crossreferences/parentheses/footnotes (even if they are only
colored text as in hyperlinks) destract from the main flow of the text.
Others have elaborated more on this, e.g. Jutta at
http://www.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/ht/writing-html.html
I can only add to this that a dozen glossary markups mask my strategically
placed links to important documents elsewhere and thus make it very hard for
the reader to discern what is worth following and what not. (Not to say that
the glossary is unimportant, quite contrary actually.)
Given that we are trying to convey ideas and concepts in this course, form
should follow function whereever possible in my opinion.
Thus my question: Is it technically feasible to mark up only the first
instance of a term and then leave out the rest of them?
How about marking up the next one after, say, 300 words/1 page/what-have-you?
How do others feel about this?
Christoph
-- Dr. Christoph Weber email: cweber@oci.unizh.ch OCI Uni Zurich phone: +41 1 257 4219 Winterthurerstr. 190 FAX: +41 1 361 9895 CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland