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

Why don't external sites' names wrap? You just get what would fit on one line and some dots. This really isn't very helpful, as readers might not understand much of what the site is about at all.

I *think* it may be to do with the fact that sometimes if you have a long name with no spaces, it won't wrap by itself, and so distorts the bar.

But I think that they should be able to force it to wrap after a certain number of characters...

After reviewing the Sourece Page, I believe that the programmers are doing this intentionally. I don't quite know why. However, there is a tag in the mish-mash which I am not familiar with; this migth be the cause of the problem. I shall ask some more knowledgable persons.

As far as I can tell Brunel only allows one to go forward up to 10 pages in a conversation without reloading, which causes problems for people who want to contribute to the infamous "No, no, no" thread on the Thingite homepage. If there is an easy way around this which I've missed (aside from manually editing the URL, which I am usually too lazy to do) please inform me, as it is my only complaint with Brunel.

Perhaps I didn't understand the original question. In Brunel, on a personal space &c. the Referenced section's contents do not wrap to allow all of the words; it simply cuts off with an ellipsis. Is this correct?

Yes, that's right. In the Hub it says on links that references can say things like 'Click here to find out more about amateur nose-picking' (or whatever), which they indeed can in Goo and Alabaster. In Brunel you get 'Click here to find out mo...', which is completely useless. It seems an unnecessary and extrinsic problem with Brunel, which kind of spoils it.

If you hover your mouse over the link, the full text will appear in your browser.


When long URLs are referenced, it forces the Entry/Researcher Data box to widen, which makes the entry (which is the thing most people want to see) too narrow.

U128068 - Have a look at that Personal Space in Brunel, and then in one of the other skins - Classic is particularly bad for this. Goof/Geoff won't mind me picking on his Personal Space.

Fair enough but, for example, researcher names all wrap. So, why not the links?

Researcher names don't wrap if they don't have spaces in, Afaik....

I don't understand why things can't be made to wrap after a certain number of characters, rather than being '...'s.

A838415 - this is a demonstration - here I've got a link with long name in the text, and it truncates pretty quickly in the sidebar. As the link doesn't have a TITLE attribute in brunel, you can't see what the rest of the text in the sidebar would have said in any way, as in the status bar it only tells you that the link is pointing at www.spacegirl.me.uk

Admittedly this is an artificial example because it's trivially easy to find the text in the main part of the entry, but there are many times when as a subeditor or even a writer I've made an effort to link words in a meaningful way so that people just looking at the sidebar immediately know what the link is to without having to scan the entire text, and brunel completely defeats this.

It might help in some browsers if a TITLE attribute was set, but I don't know if all browsers support this or support this in the same way, so IMO it would be better to force a wrap after a certain number of characters.



I do still like brunel, though...

I'm not sure what you mean by TITLE attribute?

I've had a look at your example, and I'm not sure why Brunel was set so that the text doesn't wrap, as it obviously has spaces in it. I'll look into it, and see if I can find the reason.

I thank you kindly. I would like to know, however, why a researcher's name wraps perfectly and a web-site simply ends with an elipsis. I can't figure it out and I'm beninning to think no one can. Oh dear.

P. S.: Title


title-text

The title tag, which is only valid in a HEAD section, defines the title of an HTML document. A title should be chosen that makes sense with no context; for example Introduction is a poor title since it contains no indication of the subject matter it discusses. Netscape displays document titles in the application's title bar and in bookmark lists.

Indeed, I don't know what is meant by this. Perhpas you could clarify?