[tei-council] Permalinks, Pilcrows, and Punch.
James Cummings
James.Cummings at oucs.ox.ac.uk
Mon Oct 1 08:58:31 EDT 2007
Hiya,
Back off holiday, gosh lots of discussion of permalinks and bookmarking.
Instead of answering all the message individually I'll sum up some of the
thinking behind them here.
1) Permalinks or the ability to bookmark individual sections easily whilst at
that section was a popularly requested feature, well at least more than one
council member requested it.
2) Some outside the council who have looked at the beta design liked them as well.
3) The reason you didn't notice them or know what they were for was because you
didn't have a need to use them. They are designed to be inconspicuous until the
time you think "How do I provide a link to this section".
4) Hovering over them used to provide a title attribute pop-up of "Link to this
section" (Note to SPQR:Changing this to 'bookmark $sectionHeaderTitle' is
semantically wrong, it isn't bookmarking the section, just providing a link to
it, which yes people can use to bookmark if they choose (or paste into an email,
etc.). If we want to try cross-browser javascript-based bookmark addition, then
there is code available for that -- I just wouldn't want to suggest that
complexity which would risk poor degrading to older browsers, etc. Rephrase
back to 'Link to $sectionHeaderTitle' perhaps?)
5) A pilcrow is an internationally recognised character for such permalinks, if
you don't believe me read the wikipedia page on the subject. I didn't just make
up using this character. It is better than a unique icon because it feeds into
user web literacy of reading blogs (where this is used more commonly), etc.
That some council members are unfamiliar with this is fine -- we are all
learning new ways of doing things
6) I don't think they should either be left-justified in front of the title *or*
have an orange background. I find both much too intrusive. Their entire point
is for them to be subtle and only used by those nerds who really want to link
specifically to some sub-section of the guidelines. (Which makes thinks like
discussion on TEI-L, for example, easier.) If you do want them coloured to
stand out then they should be (or perhaps a faded out version of) whatever
colour is used for links. I would still vote for following-title and sightly
greyed-out version.
Were there other concerns I forgot?
-James
(Already missing being full of delicious Tuscan food and drink, good thing he
brought some home with him!)
--
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk
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