I have been subscribed to O'Reilly's Safari for almost a year and I get better and better at remembering to use it. At the same time I have started using Perl::Critic, so I ran into a problem with Safari. Since Perl::Critic references page numbers for policies in Damian Conway's PBP, so it would be nice to be able to jump to page numbers in Safari, but I have not been able to locate this functionality and I have concluded that it is not there.
So I wrote some feedback to O'Reilly on this and got a response.
We are sorry for the inconvenience caused to you in this regard.
Inconvenience?
I think I will survive, but I still hope they will implement it though
Re:That is surprising...
chromatic on 2007-10-22T17:33:09
The concept of a physical page is somewhat nebulous in HTML. Correlating references between a printed book with its physical limitations and an online version is trickier than it might seem.
Re:That is surprising...
btilly on 2007-10-22T23:34:07
When translating from the one to the other, we know the page breaks, right?
Why can't you insert appropriate bookmarks at the page breaks at that point?Re:That is surprising...
chromatic on 2007-10-23T01:40:14
Page breaks (and even page numbers) are artifacts of the layout process for printing. As I understand the Safari conversion process, there's no pagination metadata in the DocBook XML sources.
Re:That is surprising...
btilly on 2007-10-23T03:11:33
So what you'd need to do is have a program that lays out the document for printing, and while laying it out emits the original document marked up with information from the layout process. That marked up document could then be laid out for the web with the additional information.
I can understand why it hasn't been done yet. But it is in principle doable.Re:That is surprising...
jonasbn on 2007-10-23T07:47:06
Well the problem brings me back to PBP and Perl::Critic, Perl::Critic should not reference pages in some book, the moment a new edition comes out everything will have to be refactored.
So Perl::Critic should refer to policies, either by number or name, the latter preferred. I actually use this listing a lot, but it is somewhat brief on the descriptions, but it is the closest I have found to a canonical list.
Perl::Critic is evolving beyond PBP, but still you have to read about and understand some of the policies in PBP.
Perhaps we should inquire whether PBP could become distributed electronically under a relevant license, so the book would could become a reference work for every Perl programmer to use as a supplement to Perl::Critic.
