Peter's Blog 25.2.2004

I've been studying some website design and there..

I've been studying some website design and there appear to be three ways to get a framed kind of layout:

• Frames (der)

• Tables (e.g. about.com)

• Some hack with CSS (e.g. www.mozilla.org, www.zope.org)

I haven't found anyone using frames yet?? The tables thing probably allows a news-paper type layout, it is what NetObjects generated. I don't like it as it tends to stop you resizing horizontally: the table is set at a fixed size and if you don't like it then start scrolling. The CSS thing always seems to look good and does allow a useful amount of resizing. I am not sure, however, how modern a browser you need for it to work. it is possible I am being server up whizz bang CSS pages because I am using a state-of-the-art browser (mozilla) and not some ageing thing that only gets security updates (ie).

While mozilla is wonderful, the sidebar seems to use screen space that certain web designers have already reserved for their creations. It's as if when a table is told to take 100% of the width, mozilla gives it the screen width, rather than the width available for browsing.

Just tried the 'Group By' feature in the DayNotez..

Just tried the 'Group By' feature in the DayNotez custom list. I have enabled grouping by Year, Month and Date. This means that all entries are compressed into a single row for each date. This makes it easy to find an entry in particular day, I expand the 'Year' group, then the 'Month' group, then the 'Date' group. Nice. Had to give it a kick by filtering and unfiltering to get this new entry to appear.

Sorting of entries in the DayNotez Custom grid was..

Sorting of entries in the DayNotez Custom grid was always confusing because it was sorting independently on the 'Date' and 'Time' fields. This meant that entries on the same day could be in any order as they were not sorted by time. Looking through the list of available fields I added the 'Created' field which, although it only shows the date, seems to allow proper sorting by date and time.

I think the entry tab should have prev and next buttons to step through the entries.