[bt-devel] General Book Navigation

[Greg Hellings]

I have a question about our current implementation of the General Book
navigator widgets.  Currently I see two of them - the collection of
drop-down boxes across the top of the module corresponding to the
different levels of the text, and the toggleable tree view.  Currently
we only display the selected node of text in a module, which could be
admittedly tiny or gargantuan.  However, there is always the
possibility that a module is arranged such that some of these nodes
are blank - usually because they are entirely structural and all of
their content is in a collection of descendant nodes (as an in-print
comparison, the New Testament node in many Bibles might be said to be
empty when directly selected, because all of its content lies within
its 27 child nodes.  Likewise the Matthew node is empty and even the
Matthew 1 node is empty.  This is because all the content is stored
within the leaf nodes.  Perhaps this is an extreme example, but it is
one worth considering).

Since we are a desktop application, and we have moved to an HTML
widget capable of some pretty heavy lifting, why do we limit our
display this much?  Am I being unrealistic when I think that it is
feasible to load a full General Book into the display widget and then
allow the navigation to jump to particular locations within that
display rather than just replacing that display with the next single
entry that was selected?

I'd be willing to tackle this, if we think the performance is feasible
and the functionality desirable.  It would be a good place for me to
finally bash my head against the BibleTime C++ code base after just
wandering around this mailing list and IRC channels for so long.

--Greg