Monday, November 29, 2004

HS Bio Textbook Report

Having trouble coming up with a decent navigation scheme. It's unfortunate, but the content is probably too deep for the simplified left-side navigation. I'm sure if I spent some time on it I could come up with something better. Perhaps when the textbook reviews are unified under a standard architecture I can work on something like that. Ideally I should be able to put these in XML and use on-the-fly rendering. I think that would probably allow for some flexible navigation and (one of MK's long-standing requests) the ability to generate a single document for printing (in PDF format perhaps?).

Made some minor updates to the stylesheet so that I could use html header tags to indicate the document structure. Not many programs make effective use of html hierarchy, but that's no reason to ignore it.

Think I've got an idea for navigating the reports once you've chosen a book. A little show-hide action and simulated buttons. But I'll need a good "you are here" scheme.

Need to talk to CT about the templates. There are requests to have easy access to the indicators. One option is to further divide the template so that I can provide indicator information inline with the document (perhaps using CSS+JS to enhance the usability). Another option, use JS to profide on-the-fly information on the current indicator. I dunno, not all indicators are specifically addressed, so I'll need to find out what kind of consistency there is across reports (may need to implement optional regions to attain the desired flexibility).