Revision [4378]

This is an old revision of TableofcontentsAction made by JavaWoman on 2005-01-10 11:02:13.

 

Table of contents Action


This is the development page for the Table of contents action.
 

What

Many people wish for an easy way to build a table of contents for a page - preferably by simply including an action tag. Some of our "colleague" Wikis already have such a thing, and there has been some pressure to adopt their code (which should be somewhat easy if it's another WakkaWiki clone). A prime example of a good and user-friendly table of action can be see in Wikipedia (example), which has a nice feature of allowing the visitor to show or hide its contents with a single mouseclick (provided they have JavaScript enabled).

Why

When you look at long Wiki pages, the need for a table of contents becomes immediately apparent: when a lot of scrolling is needed to see all of the page's content, it also becomes hard to get an overview of what is on the page, and to find your way back to a section you've seen before. A table of contents block at the top of the page, linking to the page's sections using the headings as link text, fulfills both needs. It is even more helpful if such a table of contents can show the hierarchical structure of the page (as in the Wikipedia example).

Not surprisingly, a few proposals are already floating around in this site, such as:

Specifications

Before rushing to adopt one of these proposals (or something else yet again), let's see what a Table of contents action actually should do to fulfill all these needs. We'll have a few essentials, and a few would-be-nice items. To start this, let's look in more detail at a few examples.

Example 1: WikiNi

Example page
Description:
Proposal(s) only, apparently. The apparently most worked-out solution has these properties:
Pros and cons:

Example 2: Wacko Wiki

Example page (http://wackowiki.com/WackoDocumentation/WackoFormatting?v=na#h7705-11)
Description:
Pros and cons:

Example 3: Wikipedia

Example page
Description:
Pros and cons:

Example 4: DokuWiki

Example page
Description:
Pros and cons:

Essentials

What else?


How



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