Re: HTML-Info design

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> Richard Stallman writes:
>
>  > An Info file is read into Emacs all at once, but it is subdivided
>  > into nodes, and Info displays only one node at any time.
>  > 
>  > Would it be possible, using a Javascript extension to the browser, to
>  > get similar behavior from a file of HTML?  That is, load a whole
>  > manual as a single file, then display just one subdivision of it, and
>  > change to a different subdivision in accord with user commands?
>
> Yes.  There are several browser+Javascript-based presentation packages
> (for example, S5) that do exactly that.  It's easy to do with simple
> HTML and a tiny bit of CSS,  and only a few lines of Javascript per
> "primitive" navigation function (eg, "next" and "last").  Whether you
> could get acceptable appearance and performance, and how much effort
> that would take, I don't know.  I would guess it's not that hard.

I suspect that navigation might suffer.  I'm using Firefox, and you can
use SPC to scroll down on a large page (like matches to some search on
Ebay).  Then you use middle-mouse on some link in order to get a
separate tab for a particular search result, and the next SPC in your
main list restarts much higher on the list again, presumably at the
point where the last mouse click was.  Using the mouse on the scrollbar
in order to rewind the position might or might not work for getting the
keyboard scrolling position back into shape.

So with Firefox apparently being quite unable to behave sensibly in the
context of mixed mouse/keyboard navigation in the context of one
straightforward unmodified long list (100 elements or so) on a fixed
page, I am somewhat skeptical that it will be lots better when using CSS
for magic folding and unfolding.

-- 
David Kastrup