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Re: [Tads3] Eric Eve's Getting Started guide

Mike Roberts mjr_@hotmail.com wrote:
> Thanks again - I've had a look at it.  This looks to me like a pretty
> straightforward functional mapping from HTML-style documentation, in that
> it's basically a bunch of hyperlinked pages, each containing a mix of
> styled text and graphics.  It has some internal navigation metadata that
> aren't normally part of HTML (in that there's a specially designated page
> that's the table of contents, and pages are sequentially ordered).
> There's also the search and index capabilities of the viewer.

Well, HTML offers these kind of functionality, although it is not widely
used - and unfortunately not as widely implemented as the W3C would wish.

> I believe the source material I'll be preparing for the new manual will
> include all of this information.  In fact, my plan is for the HTML
> rendition to implement the same extra navigational functions (next/prev
> page, TOC, index) as in-page or in-frame hyperlinks.  So, it seems to me
> that it should

These extra navigational functions are also available to HTML using the
<link> element and its @rel attribute. A simple example would look like
this:

<head>
  <title>Chapter 2</title>
  <link rel="Index" href="../index.html"/>
  <link rel="Next"  href="Chapter3.html"/>
  <link rel="Prev"  href="Chapter1.html"/>
</head>

But of course the rendering is browser-dependent. AFAIK Opera adds an extra
toolbar with buttons for these navigational functions, whereas Mozilla
should at least have a plugin availbale offering the same functionality.

> be possible in principle to create a generator that translates from my
> source format to WinHelp automatically; it should be able to do a very
> good job without post-production manual tweaking, since it should have
> enough information going in to do the job right to start with.  I'm not
> sure I'll have the time or energy to write this generator myself, but
> maybe I can find a collaborator at some point who'd be interested in
> building it.  As I mentioned earlier, the more contemporaneous this effort
> is with the writing of the manual, the better the results are likely to
> be - if anyone is sufficiently motivated, let me know and I can explain my
> plans in more detail.

Anyway, an interesting list of link relationships can be found at
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xhtml2-20030506/abstraction.html#dt_LinkTypes.
Perhaps it helps you to get an idea about the relationships one might want
to consider.

Bye,

Andreas Sewe