The latest revision of the Plucker Document Format (http://cvs.plkr.org/index.cgi/docs/DBFormat.html) adds support for several new features that require parser support to completely implement. Now that the latest revision of the Plucker document format has been approved, it's seems a good time to begin discussing how some of these new features can be specified in the input html source files. I'll toss some thoughts out on each for discussion:
1. Cross Document Linking. This new feature allows one document to link to another document. Probably a standard "a href" tag with the addition of a document attribute will be sufficent. For example, something like this: <a document="Old Testament" href="OT/Gen/1.html#5">Gen 1:5</a> <a document="[doc name]" href="[URL]">[URL name]</a> 2. Target Windows. This feature allows an alternate target view to be specified for specific links. This could be used to direct a footnote link to be displayed in a popup window, or a splite-pane window depending on reader implementation. For this, we can simply use the existing target attribute that is already defined for an a href tag. Values currently defined in the Plucker format are "default", "primary', and "secondary". For example: <a target="default" href="[URL]">[URL DisplayName]</a> <a target="primary" href="[URL]">[URL DisplayName]</a> <a target="secondary" href="[URL]">[URL DisplayName]</a> I would suggest that the existing "popup" value supported by HTML be treated as an alias for secondary: <a target="popup" href="[URL]">[URL DisplayName]</a> 3. Pagelists. This allows you to specify the prev/next ordering for all pages in the document. Multiple pagelists can be supported to specify "tours" through a document. List_Id 0 is always the default page ordering. These can either be supported via link tags embedded within the documents, or via a top level input file specifying an order for the entire book. I suppose both could be supported. One advantage of embedded support is that it would possible to convert existing href links to "prev" and "next" pages in the HTML source into the appropriate navigation tags. I've just used a new navigation tag to define these, but a different name or tag could alternately be used: <navigation type="prev" id="[list id]" url="[prev URL]"> <navigation type="next" id="[list id]" url="[next URL]"> 4. Hierarchy. The new format allows you to specify a link to all indexes above the current page in a document heirarchy. This information can be used to implement a navigation bar in the reader. This is very usefull for reference documents that have multiple levels in their heirarchy. This could be supported in a similar manner to pagelists: <navigation type="hierarchy" id="[hierarchy level]" url="[url of hierarchy index]" name="[hierarchy string]"> 5. Topics. This feature allows you to link a topic list to any page within a document. This could be supported using the standard META tag for keywords. <META name="keywords" content="topic1, topic2, topic3, topic4"> 6. Linked Documents. This is the list of all external documents linked to by the current document. It is stored in the document metadata. This list should simply be built by the parser based on the unique set of documents specified by the <a document> attributes throughout the document. I think that covers all the new features. Comments? Thanks. -- Bryce _______________________________________________ plucker-dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-dev
