Pebble: Provide "wormholes" to other canvases

[bobwalter]

The purpose of this pebble is to permit navigation to other canvases. Here is a scenario where this feature would be important:
A student looks at a timeline for the Industrial Revolution. There is an exhibit for the invention of the cotton gin (this is just an example, not a great use case). In the exhibit there is a link that says "Learn more about this invention". The visitor clicks the link and is transferred to another canvas and into a timeline titled "Growth of the textile industry in the West". This timeline would offer significantly more detailed information about the history of European and American textile. Other timelines would talk about detailed histories of other industrial developments around the world.

After exploring this new canvas, the user could click a breadcrumb and return to the original canvas, or perhaps, click another wormhole link and go to a different canvas.

There are too many business reasons to do this to put here, but I think the value is self-evident.

The Work

1. Allow users to paste the URL of a wormhole (link to the other canvas/timeline/exhibit/content item) in the exhibit and content item authoring tool.
2. Display the wormhole link on the canvas below the exhibit caption or the content item caption.
3. Create a breadcrumb to allow back navigation through any number of wormholes (if too hard, allow at least 3 deep plus the original canvas).
4. (optional but nice to have) Create an animation to cover the load of the new page.

[M3tan3rd]

I like it! - A couple of comments:
The "jump forward" part could be implemented as a new media content type. Instead of accepting an arbitrary URL which could lead anywhere outside of ChronoZoom and potentially have undesirable results, it could be constrained to the ChronoZoom.com domain.
The "bread crumbs" part is a little more tricky. The existing notion of bread crumbs confined them to a single "collection", so in order to support jumping to a new collection I think we _might_ want to split that part into a separate "cross collection breadcrumbs" Pebble in order to separate the concerns, and make this Pebble as small as possible - The browsers "Back Button" _could_ be a poor mans method to return to the previous context.

[bobwalter]

Good catch on the external link. My thought was that if the user could just paste the URL from the other canvas into the new one, it would be simple and intuitive. I agree that we should domain check as part of the "save" function in authoring.

I strongly suggest that for the purpose of this pebble, we not worry about collections, just canvases. Given ChronoZoom's very integrated UX, the back button is not necessarily an obvious workaround.

[M3tan3rd]

What is your definition of a _Canvas_?

[bobwalter]

A canvas is the set of timelines authored to appear together by an author. i.e.: chronozoom.com/bob. I am hoping to make this as uncomplicated as possible.

[M3tan3rd]

I see, so your notion of a "worm hole" is _intra_ -collection***.
A challenge remains with bread-crumbs. Essentially bread-crumbs mark a path up/down a tree, and jumps would go to a different tree path.

A forward looking implementation of improved bread-crumbs might have a stack of paths, and two Worm-hole navigation buttons "back" and "forward". Jumping through a worm-hole would push the old bread-crumb path onto the stack and load the new one. Push the Worm-hole "Back" button and you pop out to the previous path (recursively).
If the bread-crumb object on the stack keeps track of the base URL, you would automatically have cross-collection worm-holes in the bargain.

[M3tan3rd]

I would like to make this an official "Pebble" - Any objections?

[bobwalter]

Thanks

-----Original Message-----
From: "Peter S. Larsen" [email protected]
Sent: ‎11/‎20/‎2013 8:23 AM
To: "alterm4nn/ChronoZoom" [email protected]
Cc: "Bob Walter" [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ChronoZoom] Pebble: Provide "wormholes" to other canvases(#1215)

I would like to make this an official "Pebble" - Any objections?
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