Re: Navigation Links

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2000 at 07:37:36PM +0300, Ali Abdin wrote:
> I've just finished writing a first cut at navigation links (Next/Home/Prev)
> 

Ali - This works great!
With the caveat that my Nautilus is broken (I just get that annoying
"the (null) sidebar panel encountered an error" message), so I've been
testing it using Mozilla/Galeon, it seems to be correctly generating
the Next/Home/Prev at the bottom of the page for all sect1's as you intended.

> 
> 2) There are some 'issues' with it. It works fine fromt he table of contents,
> but when you 'click' on a section of the table of contents it will only show
> up if it is a sect1 id. 
> 
> The thing is - if you click on a sect1 id the next link will to the next
> /sect1/ id and the prev link will be to the previous /sect1/ id. So what
> should happen if the person clicks on a link to a sect2, sect3, sect4, or
> sect5 link from the table of contents (right now, no navigation links are
> printed) - should we link to the next sect1 id? should we link to the next
> sect id (regardless of what number it is)? should we just not print navigation
> links?
> 
> Some of you may suggest just link to the next/prev sect id as in the table of
> contents (i.e. ignore the number of a sectid) - but say you have something
> like:
> 
> <sect1 id="1">
>    <sect2 id="2">
>       <sect3 id="3">
>       </sect3>
>       <sect3 id="3-1">
>       </sect3>
>     </sect2>
>    <sect2 id="2-1">
>    </sect2>
> </sect1>
> 
> You click on the '3' from the table of contents, you click prev you get '2'
> from the table of contents ('2' will print out both 3 and 3-1!). You
> click 'Prev' again and '1' will print out both '2' and '2-1'. 
> 


I see a couple of options here (assuming they are technically
feasible):

a) always have next/prev refer to the next or previous sect1, even if
we're in a sect2

b) if we're in a <sectx>, have "next" refer to the next <secty> tag where 
y <= x. That way if we're in a <sect3> as in your example above, it'd
skip over a <sect4> to display the next <sect3>, and if there is no
next <sect3>, it'd take you to the <sect2> that follows.

I'd suggest the same thing for "prev" even though the problem you
noted above exists, i.e. using "prev" to climb back up the tree from a
<sect3> to a <sect2> and thus displaying a <sect2> that includes
within it the <sect3> you were already looking at.

For pages displaying sect2's and below, I prefer b.

> I don't know this doesn't seem right. A possible fix is to not make links in
> the Table of Contents to sect2/sect3/sect4/sect5 tags (it is still possible to
> go to them (from the command line) but no links are generated and newbies
> won't be confused?
> 

Hmmm. This might be a reasonable solution. Our current help
browser only displays links to sect1's in the table of
contents. Anyone see a problem with having Nautilus' toc page do the
same thing.

This does not solve our problem completely, however, Ali. We still can
have xrefs from within a document linking to sect2's and below, even
if they're not called out explicitly in the toc,
meaning they still can display and will therefore still need to have
some sort of a prev/next/home thingie. (see panel.sgml for
xrefs to <sect2 id="lockbutton"> for an example).

Cheers,

-- 
John Fleck
jfleck@inkstain.net (h)
jfleck@abqjournal.com (w)
http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/
http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/