[thelist] Usability Ideas/Suggestions

Steve Lewis slewis at macrovista.net
Wed Aug 14 12:46:36 CDT 2002


Brad Miller wrote:

I personally think the usability value of this tree is not very high,
but it will depend on the audience (a more technical audience with a
large site of technical content could help improve adoption).  It is an
interesting investigation.

> Rather than using a database I would write an XML file to store the tree
> structure.
> Since it is already in a hierarchal format it wouldn't be very difficult to
> transpose it to the browser.
> and if you were just supporting IE browsers you could just have the browser
> render the file, but that isn't too likely.

I agree that XML would be an idea storage mechanism.  Keep the XML
structure in server-side session variables if it is only intended to
remain for the current session (unless you are a hot-shot using an
object-relational database storing and accessing tree structures in DBs
can be a pain).  Try to get access to some XSLT tools or do some regex
(See the latest article on evolt for an example) to transform the XML
structure to diplay-able HTML.

> This might be really kewl as a plugin or something that you can turn on or
> off in your browser and would work for any site. Kinda like the little
> search frame in IE.
I could swear I saw something like this in some transitory old Netscape
(maybe it was one of the potential NS 5 features I saw demo'ed?)
version.  Anyone?

--Steve




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