23 Aug 2004 (updated 23 Aug 2004 at 09:17 UTC)
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This Saturday cerquide and I discussed a bit about Halk. He saw two improvements to the current set of features:
- The function provided to templates to portably link to slides within a presentation could support cross-referencing between presentations.
- If Halk sets the base attribute of a slide to point to the presentation root directory authors of presentations can use relative links, which are more easy to write than calls to a template function.
Good, and easy to implement.
In the course of the discussion we talked about support for sections. In Keynote, for instance, there's unlimited nesting of slides in groups. That's a good model to take into account. The nodes there are slides themselves, and there are no labels, distinguished slides, or shortcuts to go to start/end of group, start/end of parent, etc. Just start/end of presentation AFAIK. Grouping is just a visual aid to help the author organize his presentation. See this screenshot to get the idea.
The problem of sections is basically the interface for themes, and its implication in the slide appearance. I try to avoid having a tree around because if you offer just one level of nesting the theme author knows that in a slide one optional block label may be defined, but no more. And one link to beginning of block may be needed, but nothing more.
A thing I don't like about some frameworks whose document type support links are navigation bars with links to any imaginable defined spot. It distracts from the slide itself in my view, and in addition you need to remember which one was the link to the parent subsection, and which one the link to the parent section, and so on.
I think the guideline I prefer for themes in Halk is: put just the absolutely necessary links in the slide, and let the user navigate through the presentation via the table of contents.
90% of the time you give a presentation from start to end, sequentially. You occasionally need to jump to slides when a question is asked or you want to remind the audience of something, for instance. You even have extra slides not shown in the presentation that you have there in case they may help in answering some question (there will be support for this as well in Halk). OK. My opinion is that those anecdotal usages don't deserve a link in the slide. With the table of contents you have all the imaginable spots to go right there. Switch it on and off and you're done.
With this model in mind, we could offer arbitrary nesting as in Keynote, but no structural link exported to themes. Or the current just one optional level of nesting. I have to make a choice here but I've hit a wall, I don't know which would be better. On the one hand I think presentations are not books, and don't need that much structure. On the other hand I am sure people who designed Keynote know a thing or two about presentations.