termdef
termdef — An inline definition of a term.
Synopsis
- Zero or more of:
- text
- Bibliography inlines
- Error inlines
- Graphic inlines
- GUI inlines
- Indexing inlines
- Keyboard inlines
- Linking inlines
- Markup inlines
- Math inlines
- Object-oriented programming inlines
- Operating system inlines
- Product inlines
- Programming inlines
- Publishing inlines
- Technical inlines
- Ubiquitous inlines
alt
anchor
annotation
biblioref
indexterm
(db.indexterm.endofrange)indexterm
(db.indexterm.singular)indexterm
(db.indexterm.startofrange)inlinemediaobject
link
olink
remark
subscript
superscript
xref
Additional Constraints
- A termdef must contain exactly one firstterm
Description
A termdef
is an inline term definition. Some
styles of documentation collect all terms together in a
glossary
of some sort, but another style is to place
the definitions inline.
The glossary
and glosslist
elements support the former style, termdef
the
latter.
Every term should have an xml:id
attribute to uniquely identify it.
The content of the termdef
is the definition of the
term. Often it is valuable to word the definition so that it will stand
alone, in case it becomes useful to extract all the terms into a
separate glossary in addition to having them defined inline.
Every termdef
must contain exactly one
firstterm
. The firstterm
identifies the actual
term defined by the termdef
.
Processing expectations
Formatted inline.
Attributes
Common attributes and common linking attributes.
- baseform
Specifies the base form of the term, the one that appears in the glossary. This allows adjectival, plural, and other variations of the term to appear in the element. The element content is the default base form.
- sortas
Specifies the string by which the element's content is to be sorted; if unspecified, the content is used
Examples
1 <article xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" 2 xmlns:xlink='http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink'> <title>termdef</title> 4 <para> 6 This paragraph contains an inline term definition. <termdef xml:id="dt-xml-processor">A software module 8 called an <firstterm>XML processor</firstterm> is used to read XML documents and provide access to their 10 content and structure.</termdef> The definition comes from <link xlink:href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">the 12 XML Recommendation</link>. </para> 14 </article>
This paragraph contains an inline term definition. [Definition: A software module called an XML processor is used to read XML documents and provide access to their content and structure.] The definition comes from the XML Recommendation.