Re: Yelp document chunking

[Shaun McCance <shaunm wolfram com>]

On Mon, 2003-05-19 at 06:15, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> > I really don't like Yelp's current method of chunking documents. 
> > To explain why, let's consider a document with the following 
> > structure:
> 
> Just noticed that I happened to unsubscribe from gnome-doc-list (back
> now :)
> 
> Not sure exactly why the chunking is exactly as it is, Saner might help
> you there (since he wrote it). If I'm not mistaken you should be able to
> find some discussion about it in the archives.
> 
> What is your prefered solution on how to 

I realized that there some be some confusion as to what my intro
paragraph meant.  In case it's not clear, I'm currently complaining
about the end result of what ends up in each chunk, and not the
technique of using comments to separate out chunks.  (I'll complain
about that at a later date.)

Quite simply, I don't like that the chunk for a sect1 has all the text
of its child sect2's, and yet the sect2's all have their own chunk as
well.  This creates an inconsistancy and leads to a number of problems. 
I would prefer a much simpler approach.  If some Node A (be it a sect1,
sect2, chapter, or whatever else) gets its own chunk, and if Node B
contains Node A, then the page for Node B should have a link to the page
for Node A, rather than the full content of Node A.

I'm guessing the reason for the current behavior is that it allows users
to choose the granularity they read a document at.  However, I don't
think this is all that useful, and since it leads to so many problems, I
certainly don't think it's worth whatever use it might have.  Maybe I'm
wrong.  I'll go read the archives to see if I can find some reasons for
the current behavior.

Meanwhile, I've almost finished the stylesheet changes to implement the
behavior I prefer.  When I finish them, I'll open a bug and post them,
and anybody who's interested can see if they like this behavior.

--
Shaun