"externalize" metadata

[therealglazou]

externalize metadata so a link rel=toc can reference them

Source: https://n.survol.fr/n/e0-le-retour-du-fils-de-la-vengeance

[frivoal]

relaxing the constraint that the toc (which is also the spine, see #2) be inlined in the index.html, and making it instead inline in the index.html OR pointed to via rel=toc makes sense to me.

That said, is rel=toc specified anywhere? Should it be rel="doc-toc" to match the role on the in-document nav?

[dauwhe]

Options like this make it harder to author (where should you put the TOC?), and harder for a reading system to read the content. I'm working on a reader for this right now; I don't really want to have to check for both a link to the thing and the thing itself.

[frivoal]

Options like this make it harder to author (where should you put the TOC?)

Wherever you want to, thinking of your e0 as a (collection of) HTML documents with meaningful document order, rather than just as a packaging format. If you want your table of content to be in the document when read linearly in a scrolling UI, you inline it, presumably somwhere after the document title, the author, and maybe the abstract if any, just like w3c specs do. If you'd like to keep it as a separate thing you link to, you put it in a separate file, and link to it, just like many sites have a site map.

Authors cope with this just fine on "real" web sites, so from an authoring point of view, I am not sure what the problem would be. I'd actually expect the opposite reaction: "This is just a pile of HTML documents, why can't I structure it the way I want? This rigid structure is getting in the way."

As for a reader software implementation, more options is always harder than no options. The amount of complexity depends on what you do with the toc I suppose. I imagine it would mostly be about:

• extracting it into a separate view to show it to the user on demand.
• using it as a list of urls to establish the spine (see Combine spine and toc in simple cases #2 and Manifest #12 (comment))

Yes, having an extra indirection makes things a tad more complicated, but it doesn't seem genuinely hard.

[therealglazou]

I think this is exactly the kind of things I don't want for E0. EPUB suffers of a "serves them all" disease and I would like E0 to grow incrementally and cleanly. I think we should leave this for future versions, if ever.