[Wikisource-l] Wikisource books and web 1.0 pages

[Lars Aronsson]

On 08/13/2010 07:36 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> I have doubts about whether this is the right approach for books.
> Offering the book as plain HTML pages, one for each chapter and also
> one for the whole book (for printing and searching), seems more
> useful.  Browsers can cope with such long pages just fine,

One web page per chapter, yes, but not for whole books,
especially not for the thicker and larger books.
Web pages beyond 100 kbytes still load slowly, especially
when you're on a wireless network in a crowded conference
room. The problem is, after you scan a book you only
know where the physical pages begin and end. The chapter
boundaries can only be detected by manual proofreading
and markup. The sequence from beginning to end of the
book is the same for both pages and chapters (except for
complicated cases with footnotes, as discussed recently).
A smooth web 2.0, map-style scrolling through that sequence
can be a way to overcome the delay between fast mechanical
scanning and slow manual proofreading.


-- 
   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se