[Textbook-l] nested URLs

Fri Jul 4 16:01:40 UTC 2003

I have an idea on how to do the URLs for the Textbook wiki.

As much of textbook structure is divided into chapters and
subsections, and this structure lends itself well to the
web, maybe we could reflect this in the URLs of the
textbooks. I know that this was not appropriate for the
general nature of the WP but as we move into the specific
nature of the textbook subsite it could work.

http://textbook.wikipedia.org/organic_chemistry/foundational_concepts/history_of_organic_chemistry/vital_force

could be the full nested URL of a section on the vital
force historical idea of organic chemistry. The name of the
page would be only the words after the last slash, here,
"Vital force".

Maybe the page could have a series of links at the top to
each level of the heirarchy:

Organic chemistry > Foundational concepts > History of
organic chemistry > Vital force

All of the sections of the book on organic chemistry would
be housed under
http://textbook.wikipedia.org/organic_chemisry/ and the
software to compile the "next" page function for each
module could just read thru the URLs nested in the
/organic_chemistry/ section. If someone wanted to create a
different book on the same subject they could just come up
with a slightly different opener, like /ochem/ or
/organic123/ etc. 

Check out the link I sent once before,
http://test.wikipedia.org/Organic_textbook , for an idea of
how a book could be structured, it shouldnt hold any big
surprises. 

The software could also have the feature of telling after
each link of the total number of links nested below so the
reader can have a relative idea at each step of where the
bulk of the content lies.

One final idea is to use an idea similar to that employed
by the Yahoo briefcase where you can copy modules from one
folder to another, for example to create a derivative
textbook or just take a couple of modules from one to
another without having to open each page and copy out the
code.

The idea of using nested URLs will also help us get around
funky URLs and/or page names for pages with common names
like "Problem set". Plus this structure of URL hierarchy
should be familiar to most internet users already so there
is little learning curve.

--Karl

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