English > Feature Suggestions

Some improvements

<< < (5/7) > >>

mgpw4me@yahoo.com:

--- Quote from: rick.ca on April 25, 2010, 10:35:13 pm ---
--- Quote ---The fact that skins are designed to be displayed at a specific resolution is a failing in the skin system...
--- End quote ---

Perhaps is should be a browser system, perhaps it should not—I don't know. But it isn't. And I doubt we can expect the skinning system to be replaced any time soon.

--- End quote ---

PVD supports XML and hyperlinks...if it walks like a duck...  I think you're being overly dramatic suggesting I want a whole new skinning system.  All I asked for was horizontal information pane scrolling when there is a text overflow (which there are good reasons to discount, but I discount them  :) ).

I dislike having things squished into the available space (sometimes by truncating ie. single line text fields, sometimes by expanding to extra display lines ie. genres, and sometimes to concatenating lines ie. genres ).  In particular, the truncation of a person's filmography information is very irritating to me, since both the title and original title are truncated equally.  Given that a skin may be altered to provide 'ease of use' features (ie. big fonts), current data hiding methods don't really provide a solution.

It's simple priorities to me.  Is the display format more important than the data itself?  If so, I'm offbase (who could guess a database application might consider it's data of secondary importance?), in which case my suggestion becomes that truncation of displayed data be eliminated (which will require much more code than adding horizontal scrolling).

buah:
Concatenate two monitors horizontally, et voila! ;D

rick.ca:

--- Quote ---I think you're being overly dramatic suggesting I want a whole new skinning system.
--- End quote ---

I don't think so. I was responding directly to what you said... "Actually, with more thought, all that's needed to display a skin in a web browser is an XSL file (not exactly true...the xml from PVD isn't really browser compliant...but it's easy enough to fix)." It's obvious your specific complaints could be addressed within the current system, but it seems you'd rather make the point the fundamental nature of the display system should be different.

There are also much simpler solutions if the limitations of the current system are respected. Information truncated in a short text field would not be in a long text or memo field. It shouldn't be necessary to make the skin system adapt to data stored in an inappropriate field type. But I suppose there are exceptions to that rule—the data growing beyond what the field was originally meant for, or users using the field for something different. To accommodate these situations, a skin function that transforms data from one type to another is surely feasible.

As I've mentioned a number of times elsewhere, I hope the ability to display HTML is added at some point. It would be handy for importing and displaying entire pages of data that are already formatted appropriately, displaying actual search result pages, and just providing an embedded browsing capability. I don't know whether such a thing would be a separate window, a skin function for displaying a specified URL in a memo-like HTML field, or both. I imagine doing something like that is going to beg the question, "Why not do the whole display system in HTML?" Like I said, I don't know. I do know I have no use for other movie database software that use that approach. But I don't know if that's because of limitations in the approach, or just crappy implementations.


--- Quote ---Concatenate two monitors horizontally, et voila!
--- End quote ---

I think we're going to pay for having exposed this guy to Monty Python. ;)

buah:

--- Quote ---I think we're going to pay
--- End quote ---
Nuh, that one was on the house ;)


--- Quote ---a skin function that transforms data from one type to another is surely feasible.
--- End quote ---

I'm not sure I understood this?

rick.ca:

--- Quote ---I'm not sure I understood this?
--- End quote ---

A skin function that would, for example, display data from a short text field as if it came from a long text field—so it won't be truncated.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page