The titleabbrev element allows an author to provide an abbreviated title. This is used, for example, in the Table of Contents and in other “lists of titles” (LoT).

The actual titles of books, chapters, sections, etc. come from the title element. But if downstream processing generates an LoT dynamically, for example the on-page table of contents, it’s useful to have access to the titleabbrev content.

Unfortunately, HTML doesn’t provide an obvious mechanism to pass content that should not be rendered. (Simply suppressing the content with CSS is insufficient in this case because the abbreviated title really shouldn’t appear even if CSS is not available.) The only element that won’t render is the script element.

If this parameter is true, the rendered titleabbrev content will be embedded in the header using a script element. For example:

1 |<header>
  |<h1>
  |  <script type="text/html" class="titleabbrev"
  |  >Buckaroo Banzai</script>The Adventures of
5 |  Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
  |</h1>
  |</header>

If it’s present, the on-page ToC feature will render the abbreviated title. This parameter is true by default. Abbreviated titles are relatively uncommon and the presence of extra script elements isn’t likely to be a problem. But if your environment has hard requirements to avoid script elements, this feature can be disabled by setting the parameter to “false”.