[tei-council] Permalinks, Pilcrows, and Punch.

[James Cummings]

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