Better navigationhttp://norman.walsh.name/2007/08/30/specNavigation 10 86 2007-08-30T10:11:18-04:00 $Date$ Norman Walsh 2007 Norman Walsh It's been ages since I wrote about site navigation links. As the XProc spec works its way towards Last Call, I'm reminded of their value. As a spec editor, whenever review begins in earnest, I get a large number of suggestions of the form:
In 3.4.5, I suggest XXX instead of YYY
Or words to that effect: a brief reference to some part of the specification followed by some suggestion about the prose therein. For simple editorial changes, I can just search for the affected prose in my Emacs buffer, make the suggested change, and move on. But for technical changes or more sweeping editorial suggestions, its often necessary (or at least useful) to review the prose as it currently appears in the spec. That means finding “3.4.5”. And that means searching or scrolling or finding the Table of Contents and clicking. Finding the Table of Contents also involves some degree of searching or scrolling, so that's not always fastest. What would be nice is a quick way to go directly to the right place: in other words, site navigation links. By tweaking the stylesheets to produce a bunch of link elements in the HTML head, I get nearly instant access to all the likely places: In Firefox, you need the cmSiteNavigation toolbar extension. I don't know what you might need in other browsers. The “Sections”, “Chapters”, and “Appendices” pulldowns give you access to what you'd expect. I took advantage of the “Bookmarks” pulldown to provide direct access to all of the steps described in the specification. You can play with these links yourself in the current editor's draft. Enjoy!