Re: 2 things at once

The problem appears to be that you have a one-way, single threaded design 
(click the picture == next) and you want to do two things at once.

Two frames won't work in this case, as the images are too large even to fit 
on a 800x600 screen by themselves, let alone two at a time.

In this cooking example, you could open a second window, and provide 
JavaScript links to bring the second window to the front and vice versa.

A second option would be to make a menu of some form (not necessarily in a 
frame) with the two threads beside each other. You could then write in 
JavaScript (or better) with a server side script to highlight the current 
position in each thread.

Either way, complexity is going up because the requirement is not to have a 
bookmark, but to rip a page out of your cookbook and glue it to the other 
page you are working on!

> Frames are not to my knowledge used for this purpose* elsewhere

I've seen it used where the user wants to search four search engines at the 
same time, and they came up in frames. I just looked at the implementation 
on this in Opera 7 (where a "Super Search" searches Fast and Google at the 
same time) although it did not use frames, but rather two windows. Looks 
like that is your best bet. (open another window and provide the ability to 
swap with JS as well as manually)


> Where are the usability examples? (For many of our students, having 2 
> threads running in one window may be too complex.)

Never seen one, although I imagine that following two threads at one may 
pose a problem in itself nomatter how it is presented.

> So the HTML bug is perhaps not that frames cannot be bookmarked, but that 
> multi-threading is not too well supported.

In XFrames (current draft) frames can easily be bookmarked. As for multiple 
threading, I think that the tabbed
 implementations in Opera and Mozilla are about as close as you are going 
to get in the near future. NetCaptor provides a similar (identical) 
interface for Internet Explorer.

hth,
Douglas

Received on Friday, 28 February 2003 09:21:23 UTC