Modern text uses a lot of abbreviations, which can be confusing to readers who haven't memorized all of them, or who memorized other meanings when reading different literature. Fortunately, web browsers can apply a distinctive style to abbreviations, and if the reader hovers the mouse over the abbreviation, a full description can be shown. For example, "QDL" is an acronym, but if you are curious as to what this stands for, you'll see the full words in you hover your mouse over the acronym.

 

To make it easier to create documents using abbreviations, the full descriptions can be stored in another post. So all you have to do when working on an article is type the characters, and designate them as an abbreviation for something — you don't have to enter the description every time. Rather, you can enter the description into a look-up table in another post, and tell the present document to get its abbreviation description from that other document.

 

So here's the document containing the look-up table responsible for the description of the "QDL" acronym:

 

QDL Abbreviations

 

Having to edit the metadata just to specify an abbreviations table is a lot of work, so the recommended workflow is to specific the abbreviations table in a prototype.

 

Also, in usage cases, it hasn't proved effective to try to develop a comprehensive list of abbreviations, since sooner or later, they'll start to conflict. Rather, it seems to work better to just maintain a list of the abbreviations that you have actually used. If you have to do a document that uses the same abbreviation for something else, you'll have to do a new list, and multiple lists are easier to manage if they're kept small.