For convenience, Talkback really needs to make the use of bookmarks in each chapter easier. It is not even obvious that it has bookmarks. And therefore no one can really reference sections of the Zope Book.
1. It should be obvious that "Using Object Properties" location is
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/current/BasicObject .stx#2-4
3 without reading the HTML source.
Unfortunately, these numbers change as paragraphs are added and removed from the document, so they're not reliable as permanent links (unless the document doesn't change, which it does as the result of comments). I think we're going to have to punt here and say "see chapter foo, search for bar", because I'm not going to be able to create permanent link targets for each paragraph any time soon. It's a two-step process... make link targeting work in BackTalk then (perhaps manually) edit all the chapters to include permanent link targets. It's just not possible for me to do this right now (time-wise). If someone else wanted to take it on, I'd say yay and urge them on fervently from the sidelines. ;-)
How about having the <h2> titles in a table at the top of every Chapter with their respective <a>nchors?
This might work but note that the Book is composed entirely in structured text, so it's not just a matter of including HTML, it needs to be written into the framework. "Punting" and using HTML in the book source would be might be OK, but I'd feel dirty afterwards, and it would be confusing to folks reading the (as-yet-nonexistent-but-promised) text-only version. ;-)
Can we just make the location www.zope.org/ZopeBook and this will be the location for the current version.
Err, not really, unfortunately. The containment structure (and thus the URL) is necessary for versioning the book and BackTalk generates absolute URLs for chapters (by design). Note that you *can* get to any Zope Book chapter as well right now via links like http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZopeBook/ChapterName.stx as well, but it will just redirect you to the longer URL for the chapter. How about http://makeashorterlink.com ? I agree this is annoying but it's not high on my "must fix" list. ;-)
But I have noticed you are moving chapters around which does affect the URL. So maybe we need some error handling. But non-existent bookmarks don't produce a 404. So it would be convenient if you could inspect the QUERY_STRING to capture the "#foo" name request and try and resolve it with a redirect if it doesn't exist in the requested page. So any URL request with a bookmark has a chance to resolve to the intended location, even if the URL is incorrect (mostly to make room for a new chapter).
I actually have been very careful to not remove any chapters but this is something that will need to be addressed soon, you're right. But not now. ;-) I dont mean for this to sound negative at all, I really really appreciate all of the input... I'm just incredibly time-strapped at the moment, so I can't in good faith promise anything beyond what already exists. If anyone wanted to spelunk BackTalk (http://backtalk.sourceforge.net) to add these features, I'd love to see them. - C