Well, it's fast. I mean I hope it will be still fast, when not my simple
xslt but the one for arbitrary documents is used. Network response time
can be time consuming too (many hits on server, if that's a factor, on
the other hand, there's the extra bandwidth required to download the
whole file, certainly). People are trained for multitasking when they
use a browser, just look at the tabs. And with all the flash "Loading",
we're pretty much getting used to just wait for a longer task and doing
something else for that time. And in response, we expect that when our
attention is there, the application really take care for us.
You're certainly right, this can be achieved by the method you explain
too, I can't really say anything against that. Of course There are some
things to think on finding the right amount of pre-catched material, and
how to select it. But it can be solved using the table of contents, or
the backward-forward links as a data source.
Another potential benefit of having the transformation in the browser
should be embeddability. That's not without development demand either,
but I can imagine that the same effect can be reached the way Google Ads
does it: the user inserts some javascript into the webpage, and the
content is there, inside a box, with inner navigation, without ever
leaving the page.
Of course, this can be achieved with the method you descripted too,
given that the html files we're talking about, don't contain anything
just what has to be between the <body></body>tags, and the table of
contents is a convenient enough resource for the javascript to rely on.
Yours,
Arpad
2010.03.12. 20:09 keltezéssel, Sam Fischmann írta:
This is really interesting and looks pretty cool, but I am curious
what the advantages are of making the browser perform the
transformation, instead of:
* Doing a chunked HTML transformation beforehand and putting the
HTML files on a server.
* Using javascript to download and cache the HTML files locally on
the client when the user loads your page.
Then you have the advantage of a local cache without the disadvantage
of worrying about transform time, browser XSLT compatibility,
transforming arbitrary documents, and difficulty of adapting the
DocBook stylesheets to work in this special use case. The plain old
HTML linking mechanism would work fine, too, provided that you hijack
click events to perform a lookup in your local cache before requesting
the file from the server.
-Sam
