Hi Anastasia,

Comments inline...

On 2011-05-10, at 2:24 PM, Cheetham, Anastasia wrote:

> 3. Automatic insertion of the markup and code into the documentation pages
> 
> We obviously don't want to duplicate the markup and code that's in the 
> "demos/instructional" folder by copying and pasting it into the documentation 
> website. We want a component that can extract the relevant bits from the 
> files in "demos/instructional" subfolders and inject them into the 
> documentation pages.
> 
> The component will need to:
>  - load the 'source' file
>  - inject any required script tags into the header of the target page
>  - inject any required CSS links into the header of the target page
>  - inject the relevant HTML into the 'working' area of the target page
>  - inject the relevant HTML, JS and CSS into the 'display' areas of the 
> target page

The core of Screen Navigator is specifically designed for this use case. At the 
moment, it also includes navigational functionality more suited to a mobile app 
mixed in. I'll try to refactor it into a more convenient form soon.

In your mind, is this work a requisite for the 1.4 release?

> Things to note, in no particular order:
> 
> - The display of HTML and JS in the documentation pages is stripped down to 
> only the essentials, so the component will need to be able to detect which 
> portion of the source HTML is the "relevant" part. If the source page 
> contains only the one demo (see point to ponder A, below), this should be 
> pretty straightforward.

> 
> Points to ponder:
> 
> A) There will be many, many of these little demos. Within the documentation, 
> we should definitely have one demo per page, but within the codebase, I 
> wonder if that might be excessive. It might make more sense to have one HTML 
> file per component, say, with multiple demos within the file. The question 
> arises: How would this affect the design of the script that will extract the 
> demos?


It's worth thinking through the details of this one a bit more if you can. I 
imagine that we might also have some cases where multiple demos share the same 
same markup and the same component code.Often the difference between demos will 
actually just be configuration--a different block of JSON for each demo. There 
should be some nice ways to handle this situation. In other cases, we'll have 
customized markup for each demo which, as you say, will require different 
markup.

It seems to me that, either way, we'll want some declarative configuration that 
specifies each demo and the assets associated with it, including, if necessary, 
selectors into specific parts of shared markup. The biggest weakness of the 
current portal design is that all these details are hard-baked into code, 
making it very hard for us to accommodate different sorts of demos.

The easiest way to figure out what we really need is to have some real-world 
examples that embody the sorts of variations you point out. They will also help 
me test the Screen Navigator refactoring. Do you have any examples so far?

Colin

---
Colin Clark
Lead Software Architect,
Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University
http://inclusivedesign.ca

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