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>
> I believe the original poster mentioned having up to 100 acronyms on a
> page. If most of those acronyms appear on the first page, the reader
> will have a hard time reading because of all the popups. Also, if the
> reader is using IE, and the popup blocker is turned on, he/she won't see
> them. In my opinion, links to your glossary would work better. That
> way, the people who want to know what the acronym stands for can click
> the link and those that either already know what it means, or could car
> less, can keep reading.
>
> However, the glossary itself is a better idea than text riddled with
> acronyms followed by definitions.
Yes. The following paragraph is a small excerpt from a 500-page document I
had some involvement in several years ago (it is publicly available at
www.3gpp.org) This is a single paragraph from the specification that defines
how GSM digital mobile phones and their networks talk to each other. I've
surrounded the acronyms and defined terms with underscores.
The _MS_ shall send an _AUTHENTICATION FAILURE_ message, with reject cause
"synch failure", to the network and start the timer _T3216_. Furthermore,
the _MS_ shall stop any of the retransmission timers that are running (e.g.
_T3210_, _T3220_ or _T3230_). Upon the first receipt of an _AUTHENTICATION
FAILURE_ message from the _MS_ with the reject cause "synch failure", the
network shall use the returned _AUTS_ parameter from the _authentication
failure parameter_ _IE_ in the _AUTHENTICATION FAILURE_ message, to
re-synchronise. The re-synchronisation procedure requires the _VLR_/_MSC_ to
delete all unused _authentication vectors_ for that _IMSI_ and obtain new
vectors from the _HLR_. When re-synchronisation is complete, the network
shall initiate the _authentication procedure_. Upon receipt of the
_AUTHENTICATION REQUEST_ message, the _MS_ shall stop the timer _T3216_, if
running.
So, that single paragraph makes (sometimes multiple) uses of the following
acronyms or defined terms
Once upon a time I really did understand all that stuff :-/
In this particular document (it was part of as set of documents totalling in
excess of 50,000 pages which define overall how mobile phone systems work)
some of the items were defined in the same document, some were defined an a
separate 50-page document that was a glossary for the entire suite, and some
were defined elsewhere in other documents.
I had no control over the overall structure - the project had been running
for some years before I ever got involved!
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