Re: Header nesting style question

James (jtilton@willamette.edu)
Sun, 17 Jul 1994 23:04:39 -0700


At 2:03 PM 7/12/94 +0200, Chris Lilley, Computer Graphics Unit wrote:
>In message <9407111959.AA22643@pt0204.pto.ford.com>, Ken Fox writes:
>
>> Hmm... another style question: Do people prefer one giant
>> document with internal references, or many small documents with external
>> references?
>
>The latter. You might not want to read all of it, so you only pay the
>network lag for the bits you want to read.

I've had to deal with this problem as documents I'm responsible for
maintaining have gotten large and unwieldy. I've found that people do
prefer multipart documents, with one exception -- single, monolithic documents
are preferred by those who want to be able make a copy of the document for
reference, or to print it.

My stab at solving this problem was to write a Perl script which could
generate one of two "views" of a document. One view is a multi-part view,
which different sections being in different documents, while the other is
the single-part view, with all sections in the same document.

The script is fairly primitive -- it only works well with a traditional
linear document (a tree one level deep). It uses the LINK "subdocument"
and "precedes" (? I'm reading mail offline currently, so please forgive me
if I get this wrong :) relationships to specify the tree, and generates
the appropriate HTML document. It is surprisingly useful, at least within
a limited range of documents.

The script -- and an example of its use -- is at
"http://www.willamette.edu/html-composition/multiview/". As yet, there
remains no write-up of how the script works, largely because I haven't had
the time to write one up yet. Maybe in August :).

Cheers,

-et