[thelist] How do they do that then? (IHT.com)

Ben Henick persist1 at io.com
Mon Apr 1 13:52:01 CST 2002


On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, kris burford [midtempo] wrote:

> >I've been poking around www.iht.com to see how they do their awesomely
> >impressive DHTML.
>
> hi simon,
>
> have a look at this: http://www.smokinggun.com/demos/sg_layout.php

...Which is the author's explanation, by the way.  Yes, John Weir is the
one who originated the iht.com JavaScripts.

I originally wrote PPK offlist to point out that the internal pages of my
own personal site are rendered by a comparable widget - at least, one that
operates in one column instead of three for resource-usage reasons.

See

http://www.io.com/persist1/log.php

for an example.

The scripting which accomplishes all of this is at

http://www.io.com/persist1/presentation.js

and a mostly accurate explanation of the approach (e.g. less inline search
enhancement and a couple of other aspects) I used is at

http://www.io.com/persist1/logs/1009551250.html

All of the inline pagination fuctions are linear from the body onload
handler, if you're sagacious enough it should be pretty straightforward to
figure out what's going on.

The way in which John achieved the seemingly tight typesetting was to
actually dig into individual paragraphs and use Array.split() on them.
Given that he's dealing with body copy that's typically <1000 words in
length, resource usage isn't a big deal in most cases.

Something else notable about this code is that as of December, John still
hadn't figured out a way to get his code to render the same UI into a
single column.

Yes, he and I actually corresponded about this stuff.


--
Ben Henick
Web Author At-Large              Managing Editor
http://www.io.com/persist1/      http://www.digital-web.com/
persist1 at io.com                  bmh at digital-web.com
--
"Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinky?"
"I think so, Brain, but... (snort) no, no, it's too stupid."
"We will disguise ourselves as a cow."
"Oh!" (giggles) "That was it exactly!"




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