docs.kde.org 0.2
The KDE User documentation site got a set of new features yesterday.
The most important:
- There is a nice intro page. (Thanks to the proof readers)
- You can now enter an application name and you are directly forwarded to
the documentation.
- You now get an error message if branch, language, package or application have a typo or do not exist.
For the afternoon I plan to work under the hood. The current code base is not elegant or even really commented. Now that the basic feature set is finished, I want to put things into functions to get a more readable result.
5 July 2005 at 15:34
hi physos, nice job. I’m not sure about the green though. maybe if it was darker it would look better. just my 2 cents.
mattr
5 July 2005 at 16:21
>I’m not sure about the green though. maybe if >it was darker it would look better.
I like the green.
-Sam
5 July 2005 at 17:35
What about some google-suggest-like AJAX implementation!? That would be a really cool feature. What language is that stuff written in? AJAX doesn’t look very complicated. Check this: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2EE/AJAX/
Cheers, Till
5 July 2005 at 17:44
mattr: The green is from The CIG Colors
5 July 2005 at 18:07
Till: See my previous blog about the implementation details.
AJAX is a nice buzzword, but it has to make sense. I may use JavaScript to get rid of the reload, but thats it. There is no sense in adding the complication of AJAX just for the buzz. The information presented on docs.kde.org is basically there at load time and all that is needed is some JavaScript to change the DOM tree. No need for asyncronus loading of informations. (Which is what AJAX is about)
ATM, there are still major browser incompatibilities in using JavaScript (look at the GMail code if you want to see lots of browser hacks.) so JavaScript has to be used sparsely and cautiously.
This is docs.kde.org, not KDE. This is a service for a small group of users compared to GMail and others. I prefer putting hours into KDE itself to adding yet another eyecandy to a page nicely doing its job.
The Search is the only part where incremental live search would be nice, but that means an new search engine, which is far beyond the time I am willing to put into this and I did already put many hours into docs.
If somebody wants to write a fast and powerfull search engine for HTML and PDF, with UTF-8 support, which allows for incremental search in 3GB of HTML files (no PDFs yet but I assume at least the same amount of data which adds up to 6GB, the current index over all 20 languages is 800MB.) I will gladly use it, but I wont write it as long as the current solution works perfectly.
6 July 2005 at 10:31
Great, but you have a problem with localization : If I choose fr as language, clicking on kdenetwork then on kmail gives me the french version If I type kmail in the search box, I get the english version.
What about not displaying ISO codes to the user by the way ? - en - fr - …. + English + Francais + …
Cheers.
6 July 2005 at 12:34
Nice job physos, I’ve got a small suggestion though: the webbrowser (usually) sends the user’s preferred language, why not preselect it for him/her?
6 July 2005 at 15:31
physos: You’re right of course. You don’t need asynchronous information loading. But a nice suggestion-menu popping up while typing would be nice…
Maybe I will have time sometime to implement this, but right now, I’m stuck writing my diploma thesis, so this will not happen during the next weeks.
7 July 2005 at 7:39
jmfayard: I overlooked this
It should not be hard to fix. Will do this this afternoon. Thanks for noticing.
lukas: Because they are very unreliable. At least thats what I got from forums around the Net. User get annoyed when the page defaults back to a language they do not want. When I have cookies handling the defaults, this may be an option. Untill then, I have to default to the most complete documentation. I have this problem on my ToDo though.
7 July 2005 at 14:41
Till:
heh, nice idea!
My JavaScript is not up to that job, yet. If you want to try it, I can give you a reduced test page and a list of applications from the PHP array of generated docs.
Perheaps you can make more use of the Javascript version of that array, though?
9 July 2005 at 15:43
jmfayard: Ok, fixed. Now the selected language is respected. The branch is still development. This has currently technical reasons. I will look into make this more flexible next week.