Re: [restyle] Questionnaire wrt Redesign of the W3C Spec Templates

On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 11:01 AM, Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 12:53 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:
>> For a spec. of any size, I think we could do much better at providing
>> (automatically) navigation help etc.  Perhaps that includes the
>> multi-page/one-page choices.  For me it also includes (a) knowing where
>> anchors are, so I can point at them from the outside (if they are not part
>> of the index, it’s not evident they are there).
>
> We are looking at this in the ReSpec arena now in the context of cross
> referencing.  ReSpec / specref and Bikeshed / Shepherd sort of deal with it,
> but we need to get better at it.  Right now ReSpec does support permalinks
> though.  And that's a decent way to get well defined external links for
> referencing (at the section / header level).

So does Bikeshed - headings and dfns always get permalinks, as do a
few other types of elements if they have ids.  Permalinks are great.

>> Something that is probably more than ReSpec and is surely more than
>> styling would be to make it much easier to know where concepts are used —
>> ‘backlinks’ (this anchor is referred to from X, Y, Z), and so on.
>
> We are able to do this now in theory.  How would you envision such
> information manifesting itself?  tooltip? context menu?  Auto-generated
> glossary with links to where the items are referenced?

The HTML spec has a useful popup when you click on a <dfn> that shows
all the places that reference it, and when you click on one of those
it follows you around until you click somewhere outside of it, so you
can follow more references if necessary.

~TJ

Received on Monday, 13 October 2014 18:20:46 UTC