Link your documents to FOLDOC!

If you're preparing online material for computing courses, what better way to introduce new terms than by linking them to their definitions in the dictionary?

A copy of FOLDOC, the Free Online Dictionary of Computing, is an indispensible source of information about computer terminology which provides definitions for over 11,000 terms. A copy of this dictionary is available online as part of the BURKS CD-ROM.

If you want to see an example, have at look at this. Notice how terminology being introduced for the first time (like fetch-execute cycle) stands out, and how clicking the link takes you to its definition in the dictionary!

This page provides an easy way for you to add dictionary links to your own webpages. If you want to try it out, a prepared but unprocessed webpage is available here -- have a look at it, then copy its URL (http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/je/testdict.htm) and submit it for processing as described below (using the default settings). All you have to do is this:

Mark up terms you want to be linked to the dictionary using a specific HTML text style which you do not use for any other purpose in your document. For example, if you wanted to use the "definition" style (<DFN> ...</DFN>) to produce a link to the term "vacuum tube", just use your HTML editor to mark it up as "<DFN>vacuum tube</DFN>".
Choose a style:
Select the colour to use for terms not found in the dictionary. The default is Blue, the same as the default link colour in most browsers, so terms which are in the dictionary will end up looking like this and terms which are not in the dictionary will end up looking like this.
Choose a colour:
Enter the address of the copy of BURKS you want your documents to refer to. The default is http://burks.bton.ac.uk/, but if you wanted to refer to a copy on drive Z: of your local machine you could enter file:///z:/ instead.
Enter the URL for your copy of BURKS:
Enter the URL of your marked-up web page and then click the "Submit" button:
URL:
When you do this, your browser will display a reformatted copy of your webpage which includes dictionary links.
Save the newly formatted webpage using your browser's "Save As..." command (normally on the "File" menu), and then store it on your server. If you need to, you can edit it and reformat it at any time; the formatting that this process performs is non-destructive. Processing a document that's already been processed won't make any difference to it.

Some caveats:

Terms which weren't found in the dictionary will appear in blue like this, but not underlined or linked to the dictionary. You may need to look at the dictionary (here) to find the correct heading; for example, "vacuum tubes" won't be found but "vacuum tube" will be.

There are two ways to solve this sort of problem:

Temporarily replace the incorrect version of the term with the correct version, submit the document for processing again, and then change the corrected term back to its original form. Once you've established the link to the dictionary, the term will be ignored (the TERM="xxx" parameter in the tag for the chosen style (e.g. the <DFN> tag) will be what the dictionary is searched for).
Edit the HTML source code and manually add TERM="xxx" to the chosen tags i(e.g. <DFN>) and then resubmit the document.

The dictionary is updated every August when a new edition of the BURKS CD-ROM is produced. As soon as the updated version is released, just reformat your pages again to rebuild the links so that they match the updated dictionary.

Comments? Suggestions? Send your feedback to je@brighton.ac.uk.