Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Thomas Sola

Thomas Sola — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:06:35 GMT

it’s the way the “side bar” content is positioned on the page. In the source code the information in the side area as well as some of the content in the header are children of the container #page. The navigation container #categoryList is position:absolute and 700px from the right. This means if you shrink the window it will push past the left edge of the view port. The questionable items in the header are position with a negative value and will do the same.

To fix it you may want to widen the width of the container #page to be the sum of the width of the #categoryList and #content containers. Then position those two containers from the left rather than from the right.

There’s a little more to it than that but it’s a start.

Thomas Sola — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:04:37 GMT

With all due respect to Uday, (who I think does a good job redefining the concept), when I hear people start talking about RIAs and Web 2.0 all I can picture are the snake-oil salesmen of yesteryear. Application design has been a long-studied subject with decades of history and I have yet to find anything particularly new offered by anyone trying to define RIAs or Web 2.0, (though usually more convoluted). It may be news to them but generally you can find what they’re talking about in any one of the numerous volumes of work on application design. “Designing The User Interface” by Shneiderman et al comes to mind where I believe you can find nearly all of the ideas expressed here.

As the internet moves towards complete ubiquity in both connectivity and data transfer rates we’ll see traditional client-side applications being delivered over the web-as-a-platform rather than the “rich” experience being limited to the desktop.

What Web 2.0 does for RIAs is that it makes it no longer necessary to present workflows in a structure that conforms to paging through a document, a metaphor on which the web was predicated but which makes little sense for the workflows in major applications. We’re now more free to create a traditional client-side structure and experience using the browser as a platform rather than an application with which to access an application. We’re not 100% there yet, but it’s much closer than it’s ever been.

Thomas Sola — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 03:18:02 GMT

I’ve not found a place to submit general issues with the site to the staff so I’ll post one here as it came to mind from being on this page.

I’ve noticed that when I click the “Download the podcast” link on this site the m4a file downloads directly to my desktop (Mac). Most sites the podcast links deliver the content directly into iTunes. Perhaps it was a conscious choice but if not you may want to look into using itpc: instead of http: for podcasts.

Regards

Thomas Sola — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:52:42 GMT

Thanks, Steve for the efforts and Chris for the update.