[Textbook-l] linearity

[Daniel Mayer]

LDan wrote:
>I'm not the programmer, but 
>should it really be a link to a 
>regular wiki page? I think it 
>would be more appropriate 
>if it linked to something like
>[[Special:Next]] or {{NEXTPAGE}}. 
>It would also be convienient for 
>that to appear at the bottom of 
>the screen automatically, but that 
>would take some coding.

I really, really like this idea; that way a particular module (wiki textbook 
page) could be used by several different textbooks. The software would keep 
track of the textbook (and module) the reader is reading from so that "Next 
page" always keeps the reader in the same textbook even when many of the 
modules of that textbook are shared. A possible way for the software to know 
the order of pages is to simply scan the table of contents of whatever 
textbook the reader is reading from. 

A website I've been working on uses JavaBeans to do this type of thing but I'm 
sure there is an open source solution. 

In short: Hard coding "Next page" is bad as far as scalability is concerned 
(but for now it should work fine). 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)