Re: HTML-Info design

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 2:12 PM, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> Would it be possible, using a Javascript extension to the browser, to
> get similar behavior from a file of HTML?  That is, load a whole
> manual as a single file, then display just one subdivision of it, and
> change to a different subdivision in accord with user commands?

Technically possible. Wrap each node in an <article class="node">
element, style them as article.node { display: none }, then add to a
single node a special class, e.g. <article class="active node">, and
style it as article.active.node { display: block }. The script or
extension would then only need to remove the “active” class from one
node and add it to another.

Performance-wise, this might or might not be a good idea, depending on
the file size. On the plus side, navigation between nodes of the same
file will be near-instant. On the other hand, the browser will need to
read and parse the whole file up front and keep it in process memory
at all times.