http://norman.walsh.name/2008/02/01/formattingBooks 11 17 2008-02-01T07:39:19-05:00 $Date$ Norman Walsh 2008 Norman Walsh I can push markup around all day. Design, now that's a different story. Back when I started formatting books online, in about 94 or so, I chose (stole or invented, I can't recall) a design that you've seen over and over again: each page has a fixed header and a fixed footer which contain various sorts of navigation: previous to the left, next to the right, and some combination of current title/home/up in the middle. You've seen it, it's been the default style for the DocBook stylesheets since back in the day when they were written in DSSSL. I've put a contrived example online for the purpose of this discussion. This design, stunning in its lack of style and sophistication, suffers from at least two other significant flaws: very short pages are dominated by the header and footer (an effect that's redundant at best; downright awful when the design of the headers and footers is a strong contrast to the text) and very long pages offer no navigation at all when the reader is in the middle. I'm working on a project now to put a book online, more about that later, and I thought it must be possible to do better. My first idea, my only idea so far, was to adapt some “floating footer” code from my slide presentations to make the top header float. I've put an example of that online too (make your browser narrow enough to require scrolling, then scroll down to see the effect). It's not entirely successful, perhaps because of the jittery way it upates. Perhaps because it's still an unsophisticated and styleless rectangular blog. Anyone have a better idea about how to make navigation graceful and elegant across the pages of an online book?