Re: Navigation Links

[Ali Abdin <ALIABDIN aucegypt edu>]

On Sat, 2 Sep 2000, John Fleck wrote:
> 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.

I don't like this idea - and the code for it would be a nightmare I think 
;)
 
> 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).

Yeah - I actually thought about this. What I would like to do is to have 
'anchor tags' and so when you refer to something like that you get 
'help:panel.sgml?<sect1id>#lockbutton' - I will not start working on this 
though until the major mozilla issues are fixed :)