[humanities-dev] Couple of TEXTUS design questions

Thu Mar 15 21:42:00 UTC 2012

Ahh.. so the 'pages' will be arbitrary, rather than corresponding to a
given 'chunk' of text? E.g. a book chapter?

J.

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 2:37 PM, Tom Oinn <tom.oinn at okfn.org> wrote:
> 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

-- 
Jonathan Gray
http://jonathangray.org