Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
fbrzvnrnd:
Which brings up that dreaded other issue. If any of those entries go to the same place as another--or worse, 4 or 5 entries in the Index go to the same page or entry--how does your reader get BACK to the correct index entry? Do you embed in the text "[back to 1][back to 2]" etc.? Or, really, for usability, it would have to be something like:
[Back to Dogs, hunting][Back to Setters][Back to Setters, Irish][Back to Family Pets]
no? This is the issue that we run into all the time with comprehensive indices.
|
It depends. I do not think the ebook like a book that must be electronic, but I think it like an ebook, something born digital. What is a index? It is a map of some contents "hidden" in ebook and it is a way to access those contents.
Some indexes are built as a one-side way, leaving the ereader the possibility to go back, other are a "two way" links. For example, in "Syria Calling" we have some terms that, from the chapters, moves to Glossary or to Timeline (using icons for this), and have some terms that from Subject Index or Index of Place Names leads to the chapter. In other ebook we build a "two way road", from chapter to Indexes and from Indexes to chapter.
If you want to see a *very* complex index I worked with, you can take a look to "Il ciclo della performance nei comuni" (it a free ebook): it has a lot of nested Indexes and "two way" links.
We cannot use a "go back", as you know there is no "go back" in XHTML, we cannot use in a significative way the canonical fragment identifier, we cannot use XLINK arc, we cannot use Javascript
: this is the big problem in ePub2 and EPUB3: we are still building ebook using internet tools. We'll see if something is gonna change after the last news about W3C and IDPF merge.