On Mar 29, 2004, at 9:47 AM, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote:
Probably the hierarchy and flow of the documentation needs to be abstracted from the content and look-and-feel. Looking through documentation can be modeled as navigating a graph of tangentially related elements, and, as Stefano recently pointed out, RDF models graphs.
I think even a simple dynamic navigation system based on keywords ("sitemap" "generators" "FileGenerator" etc) and document types ("reference" "tutorial" etc) would be much better than what we have now.
(pulling tongue out of cheek)
I wonder if a dynamic navigation based on search relevance and basic rules could actually be built in a useful manner. Define a hierarchy and constraints on elements in the hierarchy and turn it loose.
[node title="Sitemap"]
[constraint query="//document/title like '%itemap%'" type="required" /]
[constraint query="relevence-to("sitemap") > 90%" type="required" /]
[node title="Matchers"]
...
[/node]
[node title="Blocks"]
[foreach bock define templated queries to find relevant docs]
[/node]Structured, pre-determined searches for navigation. Probably this is flawed as it cannot be described correctly as a hierarchy -- documentation really is a directed graph.
The benefit would be that as a document is added it is automagically sorted, indexed, links are added in appropriate places, etc. The biggest drawback is that it uses a constraint-based system which makes it bloody difficult to figure out what is going on, and doesn't in fact guarantee that a given piece of documentation will actually be linked from anywhere =-)
-Brian
