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

I have found a bug aka complaint, about /alabaster/ or /classic/ or /360/ the skin part in the URL. when some one post a link this http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/F83337?thread=165078 I am forced to see the page in classic goo, because my currrent eye problems. the change of design needs some time to get use to and I can not find something either. this problem is also for goo user who dislikes alabaster! I know that F83337?thread=165078 solves it, but it will take while for people get use to it. to be honest I thing that having the skin in the URL is big design error. the change that some one gets anoyed it is too. can you please do something about it?

Hi pheloxi,

I think the only solution to this is by making sure everyone uses the new system.

I think changing the URL was a good thing because it speeds h2g2 up. This is because using the old system, the server had to check which skin you wanted to use everytime you click anywhere. Using this system, it doesn't have to check as often as it used to.

I agree in principle with what you're saying. I wonder if it's possible for the URL to be automatically changed by the forum parser? (ie, by cutting out everything up to the entry number). I'll leave that question to Jim though!

Jonny

First, I think everyone should use the new link system immediately! It's wonderful!

But people take time to learn. An intelligent parser like that would be great, but I think the system load on that would be pretty high as well...

people forget use it..some have use it ,,sudendly they do not

In the meantime, have you seen this?
A691058
Jim wrote it last night.

I know it's called "Make it Goo", but if you swap the classic part with the alabaster part, you'll have "Make it Alabaster"!

This is a very idea!

Jonny

this gagdet is too y and very complicated for people who are beginners here! it should be build in the webpage!

this gagdet still does not help me! the screen fills with blue goo first
my eyes still getting more than I want. I want only see one skin if I use h2g2.

ok ..some times I might look at personal space in goo, but I think that is a bug too. I think that alabaster skin and classic goo skin should be 100% exchangable.

I choose alabaster for 2 reasons, namely to protect my eyes and all the things are easier to find.

I love the other improvements, but I think that having the name of skin in URL is big step back. the URL is getting long, complicate switching pages to keep reading pages in one skin. I found the addition of ?skin="skinname" less anoying, easier and more elegant, faster and shorter.

I think that previous version of reconising some skin setting much more sophiscated.

I use Goo to protect my eyes...

And the skins are 100% exchangeable. There wouldn't be any point having them if they weren't...

nope skins are NOT exchangable, because of free use of colours.

for example
my space would not be readable in Goo if I did not made font colours dark....yellow fonts in Goo are not readable in Alabaster.

in Goo is much less user friendly and more difficult to design as Alabaster. with Alabaster I can see without any page movement my current conversations and the reaction of other on your directly under your page.

the blue colour is difficult colour to read from, because only few colours have the right contrast. http://www.lighthouse.org/color_contrast.htm

I do not dislike Goo, but I think before you use it you need expirience of design and colours. http://www.mundidesign.com/presentation/index2.html

thank you for BBC alowing to post URL..

I keep forgetting people use colours. If you don't, then the skins are 100% exchangeable. Hopefully GuideML 1.0 will include the skin colour palette that changes according to which skin you're using... that should help a lot.

And while you may find that for your eyes Alabaster is better, I find Goo far easier to read despite the layout of my Space. It's a personal choice, and there's no point arguing about it. It's not like we have to choose which one we want to keep or anything.

I agree, it would stop people from saying things like:
"This page looks useless in Alabaster, click here for Goo!"

every one has the right use her/his skin she/he likes

but going from away from the complaint
I think that the skin in URL is confussion and long

I'm a computer scientist. I don't think there is a URL that I'd consider too long, as long as it's structured in a way that's easy to remember...

computer s are not the best designer. atleast not very orginal

I am always asking myself why 90% of all the windows programma's look like another..I know of skinned programs, but they look sometimes like frozen s..and wht are they using memeory eating bmp files for it

sorry ..completely different subject

I am amateur designer who can not get his ideas into graphical files

In comparison to a lot of links, especially on database driven sites, h2g2's links are short. And you can actually get back to a page that you were on. Unfortunately, though, I can't think of an example of the opposite offhand...

Database-powered sites I write tend to have pages invoked by things like viewthreads.php?forum=59 and similar things... h2g2's URLs can be much easier to remember by comparison. It's far easier to say your Space is at U55669 rather than space.php?user=55669 as I would probably have done... but then, I've never written for a server I was aware that I could start mucking about with the URL parsing system, so I didn't have that option...



Oh, and Windows programs are supposed to look the same because it supposedly makes them easier to use. Consistency across applications is a major goal of the majority of efforts to create desktop environments for Linux as well. Various studies people have apparently done prove that users like applications to have similar things in similar places, and for them to look similar so that they can instantly identify things by familiar visual clues, and so they have a far lesser learning curve, because, for example, the icon on the Save toolbar button is the same or very similar in almost any mainstream Windows application you care to name - even those not written by Microsoft. Development platforms like GNOME and KDE on Linux even provide systems to generate 'stock' items like menu items, whole menus or toolbar buttons with the standard icons, captions (with the appropriate translations into all supported locales already done for you) and shortcut keys (which are also translated) ready-constructed, and all in the name of consistency.

Sorry, started to rant a bit there!

surely it would not be that much harder to have skin="???" stuck on the end rather than in the middle? Or is this a problem because you are using microsoft stuff? It is much nicer linking into h2g2 not to have the link be goo or alabaster or whatever, unless you want it to. So at the moment, you have to copy the reference out of the address bar giving "http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/F47998?thread=165088", then remember to cut out the bit in the middle like this "http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/F47998?thread=165088" and then muck about again if it doesn't look right for the page you are linking from. it was much easier to just delete the bit off the end if you didn't want it.

remember yourself to use F47998?thread=165088
everyone get her/his they use skin!

remember to use it!

That is fine for linking within h2g2, but it doesn't work well for linking from an external webpage.

external webpage?... , oh yes I remember them, just about!