Book People Archive

Re: the bigger picture

bowerbird wrote:
>the problem is with "and/or".

>what that does is open the door for _two_ sets of "pagenumbers",
>and that's a "solution" that just recreates the problem once again.

This is true only if the file viewer displays the term -page- as is the case 
now.  The initial, machine generated, numbering system is a file count and 
should be labeled as such.

>the correct solution is _one_ set of pagenumbers -- the _originals_.
>(with, yes, labels used throughout to handle "unnumbered" pages.
>the set of labels you've given will cause implementation problems,
>but i will kindly spare the lurkers that particular wrinkle right now.)

>forget about "file sequence number"!   it's just a needless confusion
>that introduces the cost of confusion without giving us any benefits.
>if the program needs to keep track of it to do its business, fine, but
>keep it totally invisible to us humans, because we just don't need it.

>one (and only one) set of pagenumbers -- the originals!

A simple incremental numbering system is needed for a variety of reasons but 
the most useful reason for the user is it provides a way to identify a 
particular file within a multi-file system to themselves or another user 
without someone first having manually provided an accurate description of 
that file that could used by the file viewer for file location information. 
For instance, I searched for the phrase: "file number" here:
http://fax.libs.uga.edu/common/query.asp
and got two results:
http://fax.libs.uga.edu/bro/bro1969/index.djvu?djvuopts&zoom=100&page=bro1189a.djvu
http://fax.libs.uga.edu/hmans/hmanho/index.djvu?djvuopts&zoom=100&page=harmanho031.djvu
Neither of these files are numbered book pages yet the code used to fetch 
them needlessly implies that they are.  The shortest form of these links 
would be:
http://fax.libs.uga.edu/bro/bro1969/index.djvu?djvuopts&page=75
http://fax.libs.uga.edu/hmans/hmanho/index.djvu?djvuopts&page=31
In the longer strings -file name- is used; in the shorter -file number.  If 
the viewer code were changed so the term -page- could be stated as -file- 
there would be no confusion for the user.


Bob Kobres
Main Library
University of Georgia
Athens, GA  30602

http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk
http://fax.libs.uga.edu