[drupal-docs] Transitioning to header-free book pages (was Re: Styleguide)

[puregin]

Hello all,

     I believe that one of the fundamental issues
dividing us on the question of removing
heading markup from book nodes has to do with
the presentation of the resulting document.


I agree with Bryan that the existing presentation of
'clean' sections is not intuitive, in that readers expect
to see sections in some kind of context.

I have been experimenting with book module
to help with this.  My idea is to present something
that looks a little more like, for example, Adobe
Acrobat, or MS Word, where there is always
a 'page view scroll' together with a tree for
navigation.

     My early results can be seen at

     http://www.puregin.org/node/127

I welcome any feedback.

I'm basically presenting a 'printer-friendly version'
as a view for the section being viewed.

I hope that this first step will support editors in
the need for having sections be true sections
(one section per node), while readers will
continue to see sections in the context of the
page flow.

There's some issues to consider:

    - if we are viewing  a high-level section,
then the view may be quite long if there
are many and/or long subsections.
A simple solution is to trim all text
following the first 'child'.

So viewing the following document

Book
     |
     +--Chapter 1
     |            |
     |
           +-- Section 1
     |            |         |
     |            |         + Subsection 1.1
     |            |
     |           --- Section 2
     |            |
     |           --- Section 3
     |
     --- Chapter 2

would display Chapter 1 and all of its subsections, but not
Chapter 2 or following.

A classy but probably difficult thing to do would be
to 'page' the HTML, so that one could navigate
through it page by page.

   - we'll probably also need to rethink the navigation:
the whole 'prev/up/next' business can probably
be dispensed with (?)


Please do let me know what you think - love it, hate it,
suggestions for improvement?

     Many thanks,

     Djun

On 28 Apr 2005, at 11:52 AM, bryan kennedy wrote:

> I guess I don't love this solution.  Seems very hard to navigate
> compared to a single longer document.  But let's leave this discussion
> for individual documentation sections once we get started rewriting and
> authoring new content.  I think everything will make more sense when we
> start from the top down on the new books.  We can always revise the
> style if needs be.
>
> bryan
>
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