rfc: html outliner

Posted by JohnF on May 27, 2009, 3:00 pm

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Not sure if this is the right group to post this in, but
I've been working on a gpl'ed outlining tool for html pages
that's now online at http://www.forkosh.com/nutshell.html
and comments are requested. Read section 1.1 for basic
usage instructions, and don't miss 1.4 on automatic outline
heirarchy, which I think is one key feature. Beyond
that, the going can get rough.
The Language Reference documentation comprising
section 3 is especially far from finished. Some parts
are just missing or incomplete, and others say the same
thing several ways because I haven't figured out how
to best express/explain it. The attribute and function
references comprising 3.3 and 3.4 are meant to look
like man pages (when expanded), and may provide some
useful info about individual attributes if you've
managed to figure out the overall idea.
Expand section 1.1 and see paragraph [3]Why use
nutshell? for the motivation behind it. The basic idea
is to let readers quickly scan a page and easily figure
out whether or not they're interested. How many times
have you gotten a zillion google hits, and then had
to waste way too much time reading screenfulls of
text from one irrelevant hit after another, just to
figure out they're irrelevant?
What you might prefer is a page that first displays
only what newspaper journalists call the "nut graph"
(hence the program's name), i.e., the short (usually
leading) paragraph that tersely explains what the story
is about (who, what, when, etc), and that is also
meant to capture readers' interest. That's what a web
page should show first to let you quickly see what it's
about. Then you should be able to expand its content
to suit your needs and interests. Nutshell is supposed
to be a tool that lets writers create web pages that
behave that way. Thanks for your comments,
--
John Forkosh ( mailto: j@f.com where j=john and f=forkosh )