Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: outline renderer for technography

Author:Ian Beatty
Posted:3/25/1999; 1:20:19 PM
Topic:[ANN] outline renderer for F6 HTML authoring
Msg #:4519 (In response to 4516)
Prev/Next:4518 / 4520

  Since my reply to Bernie's questions, I had a couple of thoughts: What kind of simplicity? Bernie asked about making it simpler to author in the outline by hiding some of the "technology" for tables and etc. I immediately assumed that meant simplicty of learning, i.e. less intimidating for an inexperienced user. Upon reflection, however, it seems to me that for a technography application, an authoring system should maximize efficiency, not ease of learning. I'm assuming that the technographer is skilled, and that the rest of the participants see only the rendered HTML version, not the outline. In that case, having code text like ":table", ":td", etc. in the outline is not problematic. However, typing several nested levels of such commands is inefficient, so one would probably want menu-commands to automatically create the outline structures for tables, lists, etc. That way, all the technographer has to do in the heat of battle is fill in the content and perhaps rearrange. Mixing headlines and bodytext My docRenderer() distinguishes between headlines and body text lines in an outline by whether or not each item has children. This seems to work fine for "normal" authoring. In a technography application, however, when fast-paced rearranging is going on, I fear there would be a serious danger of accidentally turning a headline into a body paragraph by dragging its child/children somewhere else. docRenderer() has no provision for headlines (section titles/subtitles) without children. Do you really want paragraph-style body text in a technography outline? Perhaps you just want nested lists, with formatting to make it maximally readable. Perhaps something like docRenderer, without any body text, is more appropriate. A skilled technographer would probably want a whole toolchest of renderers at his/her disposal... // Ian



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