My new toy

[Roedy Green]

What could be less useful than getting you lost and putting you into the
clutches of the evil gingerbread-house witch, which is what bread crumbs did
for those children?

They were the demo.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.

 

[Roedy Green]

Makes sense. You already have path breadcrumbs in the form of the user's
browser's back-button menu. Location breadcrumbs display the site's
information-architecture hierarchy structure and provide handy locations
to go, especially if the URL's structure fails to reflect this (or your
users aren't savvy enough to try URL-trimming as a way of moving up to
higher-level topics at your site).

I figure the browser should offer you a popdown list on back, at the
very least listing the chain of websites so you can jump back to the a
previous website without reloading all the intermediate webpages. I
also hate the way starting a new windows breaks the back chain.

I have asked various browsers to implement this, but they respond as
if I were from Mars. Maybe they don't understand what I am asking, or
maybe they never view porn where you get sent from website to website.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.

 

[RedGrittyBrick]

I figure the browser should offer you a popdown list on back, at the
very least listing the chain of websites so you can jump back to the a
previous website without reloading all the intermediate webpages.

Firefox has this, what browser are you using?

 

[Roedy Green]

You can do that with pure CSS. Something like this:

http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/floating-boxes-css-layout.htm

Or:

http://blog.mozilla.com/webdev/2009/02/20/cross-browser-inline-block/

Basically, you make a list of buttons, and then use some kind of funky
layout mode to make the buttons lie next to each other. A bit like using a
horizontal FlowLayout in AWT.

The matrices of buttons I generate are ordered is column major order,
i.e. in colums

e.g.

1 5 9
2 6 10
3 7 11
4 8

I think it is easier for people to find things alphabetically in that
order rather than when they are in row-major order. I doubt you could
pull off column-major order without some server side or JavaScript.

CSS does not really believe in 2D data.

There needs to me something like a standard cookie to describe some
facts about the client. E.g.

1. e.g. windows size in pixels
2. colour blindness
3. speed of connection
4. language (already handled)
5. date/time/currency formats (can be deduced from country).
6. Javascript/Java ... available
7. GPS location (optional)
8. city/state
9. timezone preference.

There should be another "cookie" that is only sent when theh user
explicitly requests. It contains
1. name
2. address
3. phone
4. email
5. company

No more filling in forms to give this demographic information. When
you revisit, and your demographic info has changed, you are prompted
to let the vendor have the fresh info.

--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.

 

[Roedy Green]

It is a problem. Modern browsers let you zoom text sizes, so that,
together with altering the window size lets people adjust things to suit
their screen to some extent.

Most of the problem would be fixed if the browser kept an internal
database of the zoom percentage you preferred for various websites or
webpages.

If you view my website on the same hardware, with half a dozen
different browsers, it will look noticeably different. I suppose in
theory if I had different style sheets for different browsers I could
tweak them all to at least render roughly the same on the same
hardware.

Another problem is fonts. The fool things are wildly different sizes
with the same nominal point size. CSS should have a way of specifying
type sizes that compensates for this.

If someone does not have the font installed I used to proof the pages,
they can see type with type much too large or too small.

If I knew what fonts the client had available, I could compensate with
a custom style sheet.

One possibly way out of this might be to use dynamic fonts and include
free fonts to do all the rendering. I then know the metrics
precisely. But that would slow things down and it would not work for
browsers that did not support dynamic fonts.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.

 

[Roedy Green]

If you define a 'hit' as being a request hitting the site, then they can
work perfectly.

All I need is the first. I am after relative numbers only.

I monitor home page hits daily on a graph. I can see hits dropping
off if I don't get out and engage people on the net. When I see
spikes I try to find out what causes them, often some right winger
telling people how terrible I am. As my Mom used to say "there is no
such thing as bad publicity".

I also use them when deciding which web pages to work on. If there is
a lot of activity on a page I have not paid much attention to over the
years, I give it a look over and spruce it up. I also use them to
decide what to put direct links to on the Jgloss menu. If the counts
are very small and I have done what I consider a lot of useful work on
the page, I make sure it is more thoroughly cross-linked.

The hits I have now do not work for some pages. For some reason the
PHP code that handles them (I did not write it) can't get access to
the tiny corresponding *.cnt file to update it. It is some strange
ownership problem.

One of the things I am looking forward to is putting the counts in the
database and maintaining them with a Java Servlet. I'll be glad to
get ride of those thousands of little *.cnt files that take forever to
download to have a peek at them.

--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.

 

[Roedy Green]

Firefox has this, what browser are you using?

I use Opera most, with IE, Chrome, Flock, Avant, Firefox, and
SeaMonkey every once in a while. Firefox is quite ponderous compared
with the competition. You have to bring it up and leave it there. I
don't like doing that.

The main thing I use Firefox for is Firebug -- which lets me figure
out how the various style sheet lines combined to create the rendering
..
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.

 

[Martin Gregorie]

I use Opera most, with IE, Chrome, Flock, Avant, Firefox, and SeaMonkey
every once in a while. Firefox is quite ponderous compared with the
competition. You have to bring it up and leave it there. I don't like
doing that.

The main thing I use Firefox for is Firebug -- which lets me figure out
how the various style sheet lines combined to create the rendering .

Opera 10 has this - hold any of the forward/backward arrow buttons down
and the list appears.

Earlier versions of Opera did too - just hovering over the button showed
a drop-down list.

 

[Roedy Green]

Earlier versions of Opera did too - just hovering over the button showed
a drop-down list.

IIRC the Opera 9.64 list never had the place I wanted to go to. I
think the problem may have been new windows emptied the breadcrumb
stack.

I just installed 10.0. I'll check it out.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.

 

[Wojtek]

Eric Sosman wrote :

[...]
The matrices of buttons I generate are ordered is column major order,
i.e. in colums

e.g.

1 5 9
2 6 10
3 7 11
4 8

I think it is easier for people to find things alphabetically in that
order rather than when they are in row-major order. [...]

The people who make telephone "dials" seem to disagree with you,
as do the makers of numeric keypads on keyboards, calculators, cash
registers, and so on. (They can't agree on top-to-bottom or bottom-
to-top, but they all use row-major.)

And then, there's:

September 2009

S 6 13 20 27
M 7 14 21 28
T 1 8 15 22 29
W 2 9 16 23 30
T 3 10 17 24
F 4 11 18 25
S 5 12 19 26

No offense meant; just a few data points.

Otherwise known as Internationalization (I18N) or Globalization (G11N),
where every locale has its own rules about these things

 

[Dave Searles]

I use Opera most, with IE, Chrome, Flock, Avant, Firefox, and
SeaMonkey every once in a while. Firefox is quite ponderous compared
with the competition.

And IE isn't? In my experience, it's even worse for slowness and bloat.
Slow to become responsive on startup (Firefox isn't unless you have
multiple tabs reopening; IE is always), slow to load pages. Even the
"stop" button doesn't work well in IE; often you can click it repeatedly
and even hammer on it and IE will keep loading something instead of
stopping. And then there's IE's bad security. If it gets infested, and
it will, it becomes even slower, among other things.

The main thing I use Firefox for is Firebug -- which lets me figure
out how the various style sheet lines combined to create the rendering
.

The main thing I use Firefox for is ABP. In fact I wouldn't go near a
porn site without ABP, control over Javascript execution, and a number
of other *ahem* condoms. I certainly wouldn't go there with IE.

 

[Martin Gregorie]

IIRC the Opera 9.64 list never had the place I wanted to go to. I think
the problem may have been new windows emptied the breadcrumb stack.

I just installed 10.0. I'll check it out.

So far it seems faster and less flaky than 9.6x. My impression from tje
last 24 hours is that its a keeper.

 

[Roedy Green]

The people who make telephone "dials" seem to disagree with you,
as do the makers of numeric keypads on keyboards, c

I meant "alphabetically" literally, not "numerically" which my diagram
would suggest. E.g. phone books, dictionaries, index at the back of a
book.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.

 

[Roedy Green]

They say if you need a specific layout and look, use PDF.

Yes, and this font size business is idiotic the way it is. If you
don't do something to compensate the type can be way too small to read
or too large -- nothing to do with PDF-like micro-control of layout.

Tables, the browser should in theory be able to fiddle with column
widths optimally.

The places where you might want to do some tweaking outside CSS:

1. grid of buttons. It can be arbitrarily made wider or thinner
depending on window width. You can save the user having to
horizontally scroll.

2. side by side synchronised, or top/bottom.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.

 

[Roedy Green]

comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets or
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html

Those two have some knowledgeable individuals.

They are so rude. It is like making an offering to the volcano god.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.

 

[Dave Searles]

Some are, true. There are some pearls hidden beneath the bovine
excrement, and sometimes they have a civilized discussion.

Just like cljp, then.

 

[Roedy Green]

Just like cljp, then.

I think cljp is getting friendlier lately. I have not seen anyone
haze a newbie in weeks.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.

 

[Lew]

I think cljp is getting friendlier lately. I have not seen anyone
haze a newbie in weeks.

And before that, what you called "hazing a newbie" often wasn't.

The only example I can think of that might be called "hazing a newbie"
recently was a certain attempt to scare newbies away from reading the JLS or
the Javadocs my comparing it to a "superhuman ability" to "read Chinese".

 

[Lew]

And before that, what you called "hazing a newbie" often wasn't.

The only example I can think of that might be called "hazing a newbie"
recently was a certain attempt to scare newbies away from reading the
JLS or the Javadocs my comparing it to a "superhuman ability" to "read
Chinese".

.... *BY* comparing it ...

 

[Dave Searles]

... *BY* comparing it ...

Lew hoist on own petard, film at 11.