October 30, 2010
I spent the last few days painstakingly rummaging through my books, transcribing their structure (in most cases this means their table of contents). Incidentally, this represents my first forays into JavaScript (or more specifically, the library jQuery). It gracefully degrades (meaning that it at least doesn't break for people browsing without JavaScript support), but I'm ambivalent about the fact that it displays the structure by default for non-JavaScript browsers. As an example, check out 2001. The [Toggle visibility] button exhibits the JavaScript magic. I'm pretty satisfied with how it works, overall. (So far it only works while displaying single books. I'll try to work that out.)
My vision for the Books page is to simply let it grow, hopefully into a big and useful online library, for my own (and hopefully your) delight. But before that, there are many bugs and wrinkles that must be ironed out. I suspect I'll have to meander into the dark, scary forest of "Web 2.0" for that.