Jerry Schwartz escribió: >> Wait... you say you want *links to external content* in the *document TOC*? > > [JS] I hadn't thought of it in those terms. That's not what I intended. > >> Now *that*'s bad design. The TOC is expected to have another kind of >> functionality. Click a link, take you to a specific section in the document >> itself. >> > [JS] Understood. The problem arises when the specific section itself is a > list > of links that is becoming quite long. Suppose the TOC has entries for > "Products", "Publishers", "Contract Negotiation". If I click on "Products", > I'm brought to the "Products" section. So far, so good: the "Publishers" > section is a list of links. > > What happens when we have 200 publishers? The list of links itself becomes so > long that it takes significant scrolling to get to, say, "Yankee Magazine". > Even if I move the list of publishers to its own page, I still have the same > problem. > > What would be a good design for this case? > > Regards, > > Jerry Schwartz > The Infoshop by Global Information Incorporated > 195 Farmington Ave. > Farmington, CT 06032 > > 860.674.8796 / FAX: 860.674.8341 > > www.the-infoshop.com > > In that case, what you have is already a good design: a list of links. If the fact that a user has to scroll is a concern (which may not have to be, since you can't guarantee that users have to scroll more or less than a specific amount anyways -- what happens to mobile browsers or non-maximized windows with your page?), you can take advantage of the properties of the list itself. Example: is the list sorted alphabetically? _Place subheadings for letter ranges_, like: A-D, E-H, I-M, N-R, S-V, W-Z, 0-9/#. What subranges are needed is up to you. Do some publishers have more "priority" than others? _Assign a separate subsection to them_. The idea being, a frequent visitor can bookmark their way in with ease, and an infrequent/new visitor would be "guided" towards content instead of thrown into it. Hope it helps. -- ---- Luis Machuca Bezzaza Secretario (S) GULIX - Grupo de Usuarios de GNU/Linux de la IX Región http://www.gulix.cl/ ---- -- DokuWiki mailing list - more info at http://www.dokuwiki.org/mailinglist