The real missing thing in Wikibooks is a way to define the structure of
the book, in a way understood by the software. Currently the only notion
of structure for MediaWiki is the parent-page/subpage relation, but this
is clearly insufficient. All the book contents, the ordering of chapters
(next, previous chapter), even the chapter hierachy if present (up, down
chapter), should be provided using wiki syntax and then profited by the
software in several ways. This is something I think comes implicit in
Magnus' proposal. As I see it, the important concept of his idea is that
of structure and navegability rather than the viewing mode. The later
is something obvious once you have the first point implemented.
There is an extension already developed and available in [1] for
implementing this concept. Once we had the book structure defined,
MediaWiki and external tools, could make use of it for several
applications: better printable version, automated all-content pages,
automated TOC for the whole book, etc. I definitely think this is
something missing in MediaWiki for clearly fitting the Wikibooks goal.
Regards,
ManuelGR
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nigelk/Nav