Layer Cake

[WeeknightMVP]

Adding "breadcrumbs" to the main modules is helpful in ushering along course participants, but for some of the optional labs with multiple Cryptol modules (Cryptol and SAW Demos, Salsa20, etc.), it seems abrupt to go from enjoying a Caesar demo to rushing along to Salsa20, for example. The Transposition lab has the opposite problem, where participants have to go through all the different ciphers before getting to the Capstone lab. Perhaps there should be multiple layers of navigation: one to traverse multiple modules of a lab, and another to traverse the labs, perhaps with additional links to optional labs where applicable. Navigation is an interesting problem...

[weaversa]

I agree we should do this.

[AssemblyZig]

I played at integrating navigation links a few weeks back, using the markup link mechanism. The results were annoying at best: relative links were interpreted differently in straight browsing and in the GitHub interface.

Cheers, Zig

On Sat, Oct 3, 2020, 1:24 PM weaversa notifications@github.com wrote:

I agree we should do this.

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/weaversa/cryptol-course/issues/143#issuecomment-703153226, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ACRABROPWHXY7WS3R7LWR53SI527RANCNFSM4RVKETUQ .

[weaversa]

It's likely that I made some mistakes...feel free to reopen if you find something that needs fixing.

[WeeknightMVP]

A good start.

In general, the "layer cake" is a nested digraph comprising a layer of labs and a layer of components within each lab, with a recommended path over some components of multiple labs and a thorough path over all components within each lab. Presently, the recommended path comprises one component per lab (Salsa20 is the only critical lab with an extra component, Salsa20Props).

More specifically,

• Previous Lab and Next Lab should navigate along the recommended path
• More should link a recommended lab component to representative entry components of optional labs
• Up should link each optional component (entry or otherwise) back to the recommended component that linked to its representative; Up should link each required component to the course outline (README)
• Previous Component and Next Component should navigate a thorough path of all components in the current lab
• Each lab component with an **EXERCISE** should have a corresponding Answers file and link,
• Each Answers file should have a link back to the Exercises it answers
• The nested graph over Answers files should mirror that of the corresponding Exercises.

If we're up for some...exercise, we could depict thorough paths graphically within each multi-component lab and/or check the consistency of navigation in a CI script using metadata.

[weaversa]

Thanks for having another go @WeeknightMVP. If you make a PR I will help out.