If you’ve moused over one of the many acronyms in the last couple of posts you’ve discovered that I’m working on my next plugin, which includes DOM Tooltips from Mojave Linux. Basically they are big honking layers that pop up with style when you mouse over something which needs explanation.

So far this plugin can:

  • Automatically wrap acronyms in an acronym tag and set the title to the deffinition, and then apply a DOM Tooltip to it.
  • Automatically wrap abbreviations in an abbr tag and set the title to the deffinition, then, wrap the whole thing in a span and apply a DOM tooltip to that (because IE doesn’t actually support the abbr tag)
  • Automatically apply links to certain words or phrases (with optional descriptive titles and DOM tooltips).
  • Replace any given text with any other given text. For instance, I have it set up to replace g.s. (without periods) with the text “GeoShell” and to link it, like so: gs. Of course, I’ve also got an automatic link specified for the word GeoShell, but since that comes earlier in my list (it happens to be alphabetical), it’s actually only being processed once [:)]. Otherwise you’d end up with a link around a link [;)].

I’m sure that I’ve probably messed something up somewhere, so I’m not going to really release it until I’ve had a couple of days to smooth out the kinks and try to figure out an automatic way of including the DOM Tooltip script, since it’s clearly a pain to have to edit your index template [;)]. If anyone wants to help me by coming up with test cases (just put them in a comment) or explaining how I can put something into the template header … please feel free.

Edit: October 25, 2004

I’m now using this plugin locally instead of my acronym, and auto-linker plugins, so I’m checking for bugs there…

Edit: May 6, 2006

I can’t believe I let this sit for so long. Well, anyway. I’ve finally released ubernyms. :)

(Still) To Do:
  1. Figure out why I can’t make the built-in tooltips stop showing up.
  2. Check the edge cases of the regular expressions.
  3. Check the edge cases of the classes (eg: LINKs with no urls, or REPLACEments with no description).