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

HappyDude, I guess that SoP framed link is "unsupported"... Otherwise they would be using the right set of emoticons... (The smileys have a pale halo on the dark page)

It's a bug. I guess I'll have to turn off frames completely to fix this one. That OK with everyone?

"Fair enough, Jim. Sorry for making ignorant assumptions."

Not ignorant, except of the actual code that runs the site I was genuinely wondering if you had been able to get the forums to work differently from the A pages - I quite frequently can't reproduce things reported by users because I do things one way, and they do things slightly differently. Or use frames.

Turn ff frames

*decides to keep quit*

or even quiet

Q: dose my inability to type or proof read postings count as a bug

Not too worried about the 'bug' in question, as long as no-one *relies* on me being able to see the extra text.

I will, however, be very sad to see the frames view go, as I find it much easier to use (i.e. than when I'm not logged on). Does it really put *that* much load on the server?

[IMSoP]
(just thought I'd make my presence felt)

Frames view puts six times the load on the servers as single page view, so yes, it does.

: I've just realised the SOP frames thing isn't just "unsupported", it's a bug in its own right:

If you follow a link to an h2g2 forum from SoP, it *should* display in the h2g2 skin (and vice versa). For instance, go to F88285?thread=179322 and then follow the link in that forum.

However, in *frames* view, it tries to construct a frameset (h2g2-style) out of SoP-London elements (some of which fail, such as "new conversation") - and, rather oddly (since I use goo), smileys from alabaster!

To be honest, I can't tell *what* it's trying to do, but I'm guessing this is because Jim is all but ignoring frames.

I hate to say this, but it may be that you've got to decide to either support them properly or disable them completely [], as more and more errors of this sort may otherwise creep in...

[out of interest, how hard would it be for you to check how many users currently have it selected in their preferences? Might form a good start to a debate on whether to scrap them...]

[IMSoP]

Err, I think that might an example of Bug 326, as reported on the test server a few months ago - I was just about to post something to this page, mentioning that the frames nightmare I got doing something odd over at 360 is occuring again, everytime I try to look at someones journal over at 360 whilst using frames...

vp

I am not opposed to frames going providing that a single page view that gives the same information is provided in its place (possibly triggered by the user selecting the Advanced View on the options page).

What about a popup a bit like POPUPCONVERSATIONS?
I like the details given on Conversation list, so I want those to be open. But having a new big window just for the list is a bit much. So would it be possible to have a link to a popup window containing just the conversation list. It would only need to be loaded once, so it wouldn't have the loading time of frames.

Jonny

Jim, could the "six times the load" have anything to do with the fact that every time you look at a different conversation in the conversation list it also reloads all the navigation frames for no readily discernable reason? Only two of the frames on the page need to be updated, between them containing the same information (and therefore theoretically database hits) as the single-page view. The extra and tags being generated for the second frame should be offset by not having to generate all the graphics areas of a single-page view (if you didn't actually redraw the graphics).

From a performance point of view, with two frames being updated the user should be allocated twice the number of browser streams as for a single-page view, making the frames pages load faster in most cases... As this obviously isn't the case there must be some serious internal overhead that isn't apparent to us.

My point, if there is one, is that the Frames view is far less efficient than it ought to be, yet I still find it the nicest one to use. If it only reloaded the frames that were actually required, it would be even better! If I was designing that layout from scratch, I would have generated the right-hand conversation thread frame from Javascript writes in the left-hand "overview" pane, and thus only had to reload the left-hand frame until the user navigated away from the frameset... But that's just me...

It *used* to do exactly what you describe. Then our marketing department asked why our banner hits weren't higher, and asked if the whole frameset could be refreshed instead of just the two content frames. Bless 'em. It was such a lot of work to switch over that I really don't fancy switching back.

I'm still mulling over a single-page DHTML solution, but that would be limited to browsers that were written in this century, which is against BBC guidelines. But for advanced users it might be a better option.

Call it the "21st Century Goo" skin, and make it an option; that way Auntie Beeb can't object...

Just a passing thought, Jim, but I started thinking about all the browsers I knew of which weren't DHTML-compliant, and none of the ones I could think of were frames-compliant either, so for this skin backwards compatibility becomes a bit of a non-issue...

(oh, btw, Jim, you once pointed out my fixation with unfeasably large screens; see last night's journal for the latest addition to the collection... )

I think it was your fixation with unfeasibly large resolutions, but since I'm typing this looking at a laptop screen at 1600x1200, I can hardly complain about that any more.

Typing in bed, what's more (thanks to Sean for the wiring ).

I once managed to get 1280x1024 on a 9" screen, just for fun...

That's just sick...