I don't have a long story here. I wanted a way to display a bunch of small hypertext documents, but not in the standard WWW "click-to-see-this-page" paradigm. Instead, new pages can be popped up below an existing page, or to the side in a second column (or a third, etc.)
Links in a footmark document are shown with the following icons:
-- Open a page directly below this one.
-- Open a page in a separate column to the right. (If there is already a page
directly to the right of this one, add the new one above it.)
-- Close this page (and any directly to the right).
-- Move this page to the top (closing all others) and open all this page's
links below it.
-- Open all this page's links in a separate column to the right.
-- Jump to a page which is already open.
I like Python. It's a clean little language -- like Perl, but without the grossness. (And someday I'll write an Emacs mode that hides the stupid whitespace-dependence.)
Unfortunately, my web server doesn't support on-page Python scripting. It does support on-page PHP scripting. PHP is like Perl but without the elegance, speed, or power. Sigh. But I didn't feel like messing with Perl or a CGI script, so PHP is what I used.
Here's footmark.php, the page-generation script. The source page contains code like:
<script language="php">
require('data.php');
require('footmark.php');
footmark();
</script>
The data.php file would be PHP code defining arrays -- these contain all the data describing the pages and links. Here is the data file for my Game Lexicon footmark document.
No, I have no documentation for this stuff. If it seems popular, I may write some up. Sorry.
Last updated February 12, 2001.