[humanities-dev] Couple of TEXTUS design questions

[Tom Oinn]

On 15 March 2012 21:31, Jonathan Gray <j.gray at cantab.net> wrote:
> +1 on KISS and full page. And I love CTRL + F searching, and find it
> useful to be able to jump around.
>
> In longer term it might be nice to offer users ability to have both,
> but I worry about all the manual work that would have to be done to
> mark up texts before they can be loaded into the platform. Perhaps
> 'toggle section / full text view' feature could be added to rainy day
> list?

To be clear, in this context when I say 'single page' I mean 'a single
non-scrollable viewport containing text and annotations', and not 'a
piece of pulped dead tree'. There's no markup work required to get
things into this form, just a bit of client side code to work out how
much can be fitted on the screen without scrolling.

In many ways the non-scrollable page is more flexible, it's possible
to render the more sophisticated annotation view on a scrolling
viewport but I suspect there will be performance issues and the
annotations will lag behind text on scrolling. It's arguable whether
the KISS approach is the whole text on a scrolling page or on multiple
pages for this reason. My preference is for a multi-page approach, I
think it'll open up a much cleaner and more pleasing display, but it
will require some experimentation to determine which is actually
better!

-- 
Tom Oinn
+44 (0) 20 8123 5142 or Skype ID 'tomoinn'
http://www.crypticsquid.com