[Zope3-dev] Re: UI annoyances

[Godefroid Chapelle]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> I've checked in temporary fixes for some UI annoyances, especially
> with less-than-full-screen browser windows.  (I'm using Mozilla 1.0.1,
> mostly on Linux, sometimes on Windows 98.)  I'm no CSS, HTML or ZPT
> expert, but I can comment out things and move them around. :-)
> 
> - The Javascript navigator box would often display text that
>   overlapped with the main box.

This definitely needs to be worked on. There are two main points :

- user preferences that allow you to hide the box. The JS machinery 
could be too slow for some machines. Some of us would also prefer to get 
full width screen real-estate.

- python code to reduce the width of the text displayed in the 
navigation box by using some of the Plone box concepts :

	* reduce the number of opened levels of the tree
IOW do not show the upper 5 levels if you are ten levels deep in the tree.
	
	* shorten the title of the container with ellipsis [...] if needed

>   Since I almost never use the
>   navigator, and there are certainly enough other ways to navigate
>   around, I've commented out the navigator box.
> 
> - The metadata box would sometimes be displayed overlapping the main
>   box.  

Guido, can you point us to some URL presenting this problem ?
As I haven't seen it, I never cared to try to solve it :-).
	
>   Since this box is not essential and the overlap can obscure
>   interesting contents, I figured I'd comment it out for now.
>
> - I moved the breadcrumbs to be positioned *above* the ZMI tabs.  I
>   consider this an improvement: the tabs ought to be subordinate to
>   the breadcrumbs since switching tabs doesn't change the location.
>   This makes for a more logical hierarchy. 

It seems that there are at least two opposite POV on this one.

My idea is that if the breadcrumbs are above the view tabs, they are 
separated from the view contents. This weaken the link between the 
object view and its location. This could be solved by putting more 
visual emphasis on the breadcrumbs so that they stay enough in view for 
newcomers.

Anyway, I'd like users to express their preference in order to make a 
final decision.

>   The spacing doesn't look
>   perfect, someone with CSS zen might want to look into this.  But I
>   don't see this placement as a temporary hack, like the first to
>   bullets -- I can still remember being seriously confused by the
>   relative positioning of breadcrumbs and tabs in the Zope 2 ZMI.
> 
> There are no unit or functional tests that test any of these, so the
> impact on "make test" of these changes should be zero.
> 
Yep

> --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)


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Godefroid Chapelle

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