It normally places the tooltip relative to the link’s location on the page, but I modified it to follow the mouse while the user hovers over the link. The best part is that you don’t have to modify any link code, it’s all completely done by whether or not there is a title attrib on the link. Email me if you’d like the code for my mouse following version, or you could always just view my page’s source and download the nicetitle.js file. Hope this helps.

Paul

Honestly, I’d feel better about reading acronyms from a server if it was strictly moderated, and updates were scheduled or manual. The problem with a PHP plugin is that you end up doing a lot of work to do such ‘regular’ updates, when you should just be using cron or AT or Windows Scheduler Service.

Anyway, more to the point, there are already hundreds of acronym services already available on the net. The problem is, any acronym server which takes additional deffinitions quickly grows huge, with databases of 50,000 to 170,000 acronyms despite being specialized. You’d want to write a service that queried one or more of these with each acronym you posted (assuming you would put your acronyms in ALL CAPS or use some other way of recognizing new ones) and then just cache locally the ones you had actually used, because there’s no way you’re going to store definitions of a couple of hundred acronyms on each blog…

Personally, I’m actually leaning toward not doing this at all on my site. The fact of the matter is, I don’t need (or, really, want) a visible acronym tag style on every instance of “HTML” on my site. It unecessarily emphasizes something which should not be emphasized. Besides that, my readers should already know what HTML means, otherwise they’re not going to understand most of the site anyway, so there’s really no point.

As with any publication, it makes more sense to define “new” acronyms in the text the first time you use them in an article, and not at all after that. I don’t mind having the acronym or abbr tags in the source (without a style attached) if it helped some semantic application, but somehow I think that it would only be helpful in the case of unusual or obscure acronyms.