Re: Request for comments: prettify snippets page

[John Mandereau]

Le samedi 29 décembre 2007 à 12:24 -0300, Han-Wen Nienhuys:
> I think that using tags for classifying the snippets is a better
> approach than the subdirectory approach from the user perspective.  I
> am -however- not volunteering to actually do it :-)

Yeah, all this is interesting, but it has not a very high priority in my
todo list, and we need to put all snippets in one directory first.  I
add comments below for the record.


> I wonder how many people use PDF to browse the snippets. I suspect it
> might not be that many. Does anyone on the list use PDF for the
> snippets?

IIRC some users have requested to have all snippets in one single PDF.
Currently, snippets PDFs are almost not linked at all from documentation
index or snippets page, so users currently have to download the docball
and browse it manually to find them, or guess the URLs.  It'll be easier
to add a link when we have one single PDF.


> Maybe you could start from a html page (lilypond-book has a html mode
> too) rather than texinfo.

Yes, I hope we'll be able to get the same hashs than texinfo snippets
for texinfo.


> If you modify the lp-book script you could
> make it generate each fragment in
> 
>   <div  name="foo" displayed="false" lytags="tag1,tag2,...">
> 
> then a little piece of javascript could ask for a tag, and traverse
> all document sections toggling the visibility, depending on the tags
> requested.

Yes, that's an idea.  There are lots of ways to achieve a similar
result, but I've not the required experience to know which one is easier
to code/maintain/use.


> I am not very familiar with the javascript side of things.

We would only use standard Javascript and DOM, which is well supported
by all recent "heavy" browsers.


> I am not sure how you would do linking to a specific tag.

I'd expect a javascript to capture tags as a URL argument (e.g.
'snippets.html?tags=pitches') by applying regexps to the URL got with
window.location().

Best,
John