open hypertext idea

hey,

was thinking about this just recently. A lot of topics that are covered on the nets/comms, IO or indeed any of the
relatively technical boards tend to use complicated terms to describe things. Well perhaps not complicated, but area specific anyway. Which is fairly obvious due to the technical nature of the boards.

It would be handy to have tooltips for commonly used abbreviations/terms/acronymons. So when the mouse is moved over a specific hotword, a small tooltip with a bit of an explanation and maybe a link to more info is displayed. A small bit of Javascript could handle the floating tooltip part quite easily.

It wouldn't be particularly difficult to develop on the server side, though it could possibly put a significant increase on the load for the generation of a page, as it has to check for a list of hotwords to retrieve the explanation for.

Indivial users could just put forward a word and an explanation on a specific board and all the moderators could vet the words. People could also disable the system from their CP. It would also have to be quite subtle so as to not cause information overload. Simply color the word hotwords slighty differently perhaps.

How in ever. That's the idea anyway, akin to a open hypertext system, or the microsoft plan with IE there a year ago.

Gav