h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Can I just ask why there isn't the option to have 'frames' in brunel?

Hi Alison

Brunel was designed after the BBC had taken over the site and the BBC doesn't use frames.

Amy

How rude! Lol, okay, thanks

Very consise, well done!

A lot of sites don't use frames anymore, because you can do everything much better in tables. So yes, frames view is a pre-bbc holdover, so new skins and sites won't have it.

Tango

It is thought by the majority of website designers that frames aren't good practice due to the fact that they "clutter the screen"...

Yeah, that's basically what i meant. Tables are tidier.

Tango

Don't you agree with that view then Crazy Man?!

Well, personally, I think that tables and indeed, the "single pages" format is neater...

...but *I* personally prefer the Classic Goo skin with the frames layout for this particular site because then I can see other conversations about the entry and who has posted to the conversation I'm looking at. Also, I've been using this site since 2000, and I'm used to it

Yeah see, I'm used to Brunel cos by the time I joined it was already the default so I'd viewed the site in Brunel before I even registered. I personally think Brunel is the best skin for many different reasons, but the *one* thing that is annoying is that you can't view it with frames. Cos like you say, that would be more useful for conversations. But hey, c'est la vie - you can't have everything!!

We also think that if all the skins were the same, we might as well have only one skin. We like the differences.

That reason is so silly it must have come off an official list... skins are meant to look different, not be functionally different. That's the definition of a skin.

Tango

Bah, Tango. You obviously haven't taken the course in Open Hypermedia that I have.

Replace the words "skin" with "user view" and you'll soon see that having several functionally-different skins is a much more important thing to have on a website than several different-looking ones.

Theoretically, we should have a pure XML feed too, so we can write our own front-ends, but that's a different story...

~

Brunel was designed to have different functionality, not just to be a different colour.

IIRC the only features brunel had at launch that weren't in the other skins were things that had been invented after the other skins were made, and no-one had found time to update them. Which i believe they have now. What differences are there, still?

Tango

And in reply to the owl:

h2g2 uses user preferences to determine functionality (eg. Expert User) rather than the skins.

Tango

Oh, and about an xml feed, that would be nice, and we have asked jim, but he had been less than helpful...

Tango

You can do a lot without an XML feed. For example I've got a frameset which shows several conversation lists at once (with s_popup set), so that I can track my conversations (from multiple accounts) and those of h2g2 support.

If you really want to extract other information (like watching who's online for your friends) it's actually quite easy to parse the 'plain' skin's output.

spelugx

Isn't that what your "hoobot" does?

Tango

Yep It makes extensive use of HTML::TreeBuilder. I have considered using it to read in the plain skin and spit out XML, but that's very slow.

I have wondered about formats for an XML stream, I suppose at the moment they use a homemade schema, but they could probably use something like RSS or RDF which are much more 'pure', as you call it.

spelugx