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

I've just come from a threat about Digibox users... they can surf the web (by clicking on links), but have no way to type in urls.

It seems to me that it should be reasonably simple to have a server-side script of some sort that will present a page full of links for each letter, symbol, etc, and allow a link to be build up and then used... to save having to store state explicitly, the current entered text could be included in each url.

Unfortunately I have absolutely no experience with this kind of thing... could someone more knowledgable tell me whether I'm being completely crazy here?

That's a *thread* about Digibox users...

So, let me see, you're wanting a page where they can click on buttons on the page to build up a url and then when they're finished click on "GO" and get transferred to that page?

Do they have access to Javascript?

Okay, I've written a page that displays the necessary keys from a keyboard as links on a page. Each time you click on the key/link it adds it to the current target url. When you've finished you click on a Go There link which then takes you the to url you've clicked in.

I'll stick it up as soon as I get home and we can see if it's of any use.

Cool ... how'd you do it?

For the record, here's the Digibox thread:

F19585?thread=217110

This method is using a php script, which may or may not be a problem for digbox users, we'll have to find out, and a load of forms to pass information around.

If the boxes can't handle php then I'll code it using Javascript, which is a rather longwinded way.

I've put a link to the Beta version in the other thread.

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Looks good ...

If that doesn't work, I've just knocked up a nice little perl script (I've been using perl since yesterday ) which does the same thing but is entirely server-side, and so will work with anything...

all you really need is some script and then IMG tags with the onClick attribute etc... and one for backspace reply

Yeah, but that's too easy

Also, we haven't yet worked out whether the box things will do javascript...

But we do now know that they can't access sites off bbc, or other selected sites.

Yus. Any suggestions for getting around that?

I can't think of any ... well, apart from the obvious 'persuade the BBC to put something on their site'. Not too likely, one would think...

There is always a way, and even one that I know off, but, err.. It's break the house rules, so I won't. Sorry.