Last night it was 11-pm when I shut my desktop down. All evening, except for the nine pm CBC news hour with dishes, I had worked on the design of the html5 handout docket for my audio talks. I needed to make this more workable and user friendly, since many talks have handouts, some of which are complex, such as for the China talk.
I wanted to have a design that would enable the user to display the handout and then click a return link on this handout that would bring it back to the point of departure. I did have a primitive working example of this for one item in my New Testament talk. Its design was based on a fluke insight that became forgotten (2010!) as I solved other problems, but was rediscovered while I upgraded the New Testament audio file to the HTML5 markup.
So, last night I first applied the old design to the other three handouts of that talk. That done, I started to look at how I could apply the HTML5 to this design, which I did. Next it became clear that this ‘handout-docket’ file as I called it, also needed its own style sheet and styling.
The styling is always slow, because I have to use trial and error for the various design ideas that pop up in my had. For example I wanted to add an arrow to go with the return link. Well, how do you put an arrow &larr? Or &rarr! Not here, but on the web page. That html code inside [] looks like this →
for an arrow to the right.
But after all this, I now have a design that is flexible enough to be applied to other talk handouts. If I am up to it, I will put a direct link in this document to the handout in question.