Authoring BinderBabies
In principle, the author of a BinderBaby needed only to be able to produce html pages. In practice, BinderBabies were slightly complicated to set up, but not overly so if you followed directions carefully. What follows is a general description of the process; full details can be found on the BinderBabies website. (Some of the original links on this site have been deadened.) |
| The first step was to make a cover, an initial page (e.g. a table of contents) and header pages for each of the sections. These pages were essentially free-form (without links) and could be decorated at will. |
| The second step was to set up the booklet itself with the correct number of sections and colour for the trim parts of the interior. This was accomplished by creating a setup page, a webpage that the author looked at in an editor and designed there. A template page was provided for the setup; when modified, it looked like the Honeybees one. |
| The next step was to produce the paths. A path is basically just a sequence of content pages together with an html setup page containing of a series of links to those pages in the correct order. You could then link to the path from any other content page; the trick was that the link had to go to the path setup page, not the first page of the path (even though the first page of the path was what got displayed). A template page was provided for paths as well. |
The final step, once all the paths were linked together, was to make a special type of link from some other normal webpage to open the BinderBaby in its own window. |