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Subject: Wider text area for posting
Posted by: Guru
- [330592710] Thu, Feb 14, 2002, 10:55
You may have noticed that the text area for entering messages is a bit wider than it used to be.
As has been noted in other threads, the Netscape 6 browser has an apparent bug that effectively inserts a line feed at the end of each line in the textarea, regardless of whether one was actually entered or not. The forum software faithfully reproduces this phantom line feed, with the resulting message looking odd because of its narrow width.
I haven't figured out an elegant way to compensate for this, although Netscape 6 users could select the "ignore line feed" option. This, however, would mean that if you wanted to force a new line, you would need to enter an html tag to do so, such as [br] or [/p][p] - replacing the [] with <> in either case.
However, it seemed harmless to widen the input area by an extra 20 columns. This will cause the Netscape 6 posts to be a little wider, while still keeping the standard page from extending beyond the boundaries of an 800x600 screen resolution. |
| 1 | Sludge
Sustainer
ID: 54131712
Tue, Feb 19, 2002, 10:52
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Guru -
I have my screen resolution at 1600x1200, and I have to make my browser 880 pixels wide to view the entire text width in threads created since you've implemented this change. I'm using IE, and have no idea how it behaves for Netscape since I just recently uninstalled it. Am I the only one? Over 50% of the width of a 1600x1200 screen is an awful lot of space to take up.
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| 2 | Guru
ID: 330592710
Tue, Feb 19, 2002, 11:03
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Interesting perspective. I usually open the browser in a full screen, and hadn't considered the implications for those who have multiple windows arranged so that they are all concurrently visible.
Perhaps I'll just revert to the original setting. I thought this was an opportunity to improve one facet without impacting anything else. But apparently that is incorrect. And the issue I was trying to improve was only a nit.
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| 3 | StLCards
Sustainer
ID: 2504849
Tue, Feb 19, 2002, 11:13
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I have no problems at work on my high res large monitors, but since the changes I have to scroll across from home even with the window set to full screen. Just have a low end small monitor.
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| 4 | blue hen, almighty
Leader
ID: 34937217
Tue, Feb 19, 2002, 21:29
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Actually, I like this one MUCH better.
I'd actually like more columns (vertical) as well. When I do the WWF standings, it's tough to scroll up to see that day's results to add them up. But that's a pretty isolated case.
Thanks for the width adjustment... I'd actually thought about sending that one along but, as usual, you're several steps ahead.
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| 5 | Sludge
Sustainer
ID: 113368
Tue, Feb 19, 2002, 23:06
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Again out of curiosity, what prevents you from coding the message board in such a way that each message acts as a seperate entity with respect to text wrapping? In other words, why does an extremely wide table or someone with a broken space bar deciding to write supercalifragilisticexpialidociouseventhoughthesoundofitissimplyquiteatrociousifyousayitloudenoughyou'llalwayssoundprecocioussupercalifragilisticexpialidocious have to decide the width of all the messages (or at least those that don't code in their own line breaks)? Is it the browsers themselves that prevent the linebreaks in each message from being determined based on the window size of the browser?
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| 6 | Guru
ID: 330592710
Thu, Feb 21, 2002, 22:56
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Yes, the browser will allow text to expand to the width of the open window. But if there is no space in a line, the browser will not force a break. And once the width of the window has been widened beyond the normal boundaries, everything on the page will be allowed to expand to that width.
The forum software itself does not make the width determination. It's solely a browser function.
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| 7 | Sludge
Sustainer
ID: 54131712
Fri, Feb 22, 2002, 09:58
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Please don't take any of this as criticism, Guru. I hope you understand that I'm just trying to make the world a better place. :)
Anyway, take a quick trip to my fantasy football league's website here. There is a table already present that holds the standings for our two divisions, and I've added two test lines (one inside a paragraph of text, and the other outside at the very bottom) consisting of a long unbroken string of O's.
When I re-size the window, all of the normal text expands or contracts as the window size expands or contracts, even if the test lines or the table are beyond the edge of the window. Even the text in the same paragraph ([p], [/p] block) as the first test string expands or contracts. I'm only wondering why that behavior can't be duplicated on the message boards. (Again, I'm only an amateur at html and a know-nothing at writing a message board.)
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| 8 | Sludge
Sustainer
ID: 54131712
Fri, Feb 22, 2002, 09:59
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Oh, and by all means, delete or edit the supercali... from message #5.
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| 9 | Guru
ID: 330592710
Fri, Feb 22, 2002, 10:31
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Very interesting, Sludge. I don't know how they did that. I'll have to peek inside the code and see if I can figure out what's causing the favorable wraparound treatment.
It would be nice to solve this issue. It's certainly more relevant than leading zeros in clock times!
If anyone else knows how to do this, please chime in.
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| 10 | Guru
ID: 330592710
Fri, Feb 22, 2002, 10:49
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Upon further review, the favorable line wrapping in the link provide by Sludge is occuring outside of any tables.
If I put that html code inside a table, then it no longer wraps favorably. I'm not sure why that matters, but it apparently does.
The forum message area is within a table, which is required in order to get the proper formatting for each thread. The issue then becomes whether a table data cell can be controlled to not exceed the width of a browser frame, especially if other data cells do expand beyond that width.
There may be a way to do that, although off the top of my head, I'm not sure how. Let me give it some thought.
(And I'll just leave the supercalifragilistic.... there, since it demonstrates the point rather succinctly.)
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| 11 | Sludge
Sustainer
ID: 54131712
Fri, Feb 22, 2002, 13:02
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How about something like this?
It's a hack job, and there are probably hanging [/table]'s at the end of the file, and the cells containing the Gurupie information aren't all the same width, but I think you can see the gist. Basically, I just inserted a [/table] and a [table] between the comments delimiting the start/end of the replies, making each reply a table of its own.
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| 12 | Guru
ID: 330592710
Fri, Feb 22, 2002, 14:18
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Yeah, sludge, I thought about trying an approach similar to that. The slightly uneven widths of the left cells are a little disturbing, although I can probably control that. I'll work on it.
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| 13 | Sludge
Sustainer
ID: 54131712
Fri, Feb 22, 2002, 15:15
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Hmmm... Using "width" isn't going to do it, because the browser will only obey the width commands if it is possible to do so and still display the text. A possibility would be to use a fixed-width font for the message number (and make sure there is enough room for 1000 total messages? I.e. "1" would be " 1"), and a fixed width font for the date/time, and be sure you always use the same number of characters for each date/time stamp, which you already do. Then what happens when the name exceeds the length of the date/time?
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| 14 | Bungers
ID: 38082016
Fri, Feb 22, 2002, 22:34
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Sludge, you fell apart in the playoffs after going 11-3. What up?
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| 15 | blue hen, almighty
Leader
ID: 27048221
Sat, Feb 23, 2002, 07:21
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The name can't exceed the time. I tried.
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| 16 | blue hen, almighty
Leader
ID: 27048221
Sat, Feb 23, 2002, 07:26
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And while Sludge is probably on the right track, I wouldn't make a separate table for each entry. Complex tabling takes forever to load, especially in Netscape. Some of the longer threads already take a century to download and I wouldn't want to be the one responsible for making that time even longer.
Having 100's of tables on a single page just doesn't seem like a very good idea to me.
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| 17 | Sludge
Sustainer
ID: 113368
Sat, Feb 23, 2002, 11:37
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Bungers -
Did you happen to look at my team? I was lucky to go 11-3. I predicted 8-6 for myself before the start of the season.
If you want dissapointment, try the Slime here.
bh -
We won't know until we try. Some possibilities I can think of would be to break the thread up into, say, 25 posts per page with links to each page (if there are more than one) on the thread index. Something kinda like what they do at the discussion forums at Trillian. They have [table]/[/table] blocks flying around like crazy if you look at the source for one of their threads, so take a peek in Netscape and let us know how quick/slow it is to load.
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| 18 | quik_ag
ID: 368423022
Sat, Feb 23, 2002, 15:11
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several tables might actually be the way to go. the bottleneck i think is the bandwidth and not how fast each browser renders the table. Netscape, i believe, has to download the entire table before it begins to render each cell, breaking it into single tables might make it faster in that it would download a single table, render it, download the next, render it, etc. the rendering should be instantaneous relative to the download time. so with individual tables, you should be able to browse the first entries before the last ones have even been downloaded.
If the download time issue is taht big, Guru may want to look into optimizing his HTML code. removing comments, white space, and line breaks could probably shrink the file sizes 10% or so..
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| 19 | Tim G
Donor
ID: 59126280
Thu, Feb 28, 2002, 03:31
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testing...1,2,3, 17, 9.95, 19.95, 29.95
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| 20 | Guru
ID: 330592710
Thu, Feb 28, 2002, 10:23
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Tim G (and everyone else) - if you want to test something, try using the test forum. It's fully functional, but out of mainstream view.
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