[tocml-list] Interface example

[Curtis Duhn]

If my scattered explanations of the proposed TOCML user agent are
confusing, it might help to check out the site that inspired the idea.  Go
to http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ in a Microsoft IE browser
(unfortunately it doesn't render with expanding trees in Mozilla) and play
with the tree control on the left-hand side.

A few years back when I was a Windows developer, I was continually amazed
with how quickly I could find documents using this tree interface.  It
took a little while to get familiar with their taxonomy, but once I
did, the tree control became more efficient to use than the search engine.
That's really impressive when you consider that their corpus contains
several gigabytes of text documents.

I soon found myself craving this type of tree interface for every site I
visited.  It occurred to me that this could be integrated with the
browser, if only there existed an XML spec that everyone could use to
publish their hierarchical site maps.

So I started daydreaming about TOCML.  For a couple of years it fought a
losing battle for brain-time against my other ideas, but for whatever
reason I recently got a bug up my ass and decided to turn this idea into a
spec.  I'm hoping some other people will get excited about TOCML, and
we can start some open-source projects that implement it.

There.  You now have an example interface, and a gratuitous history
lesson.  (Sorry about that.)

Curtis Duhn
curtis@duhn.com