Re: design

Alex, All,

On May 11, 2004, at 15:39, Alex Keeny wrote:
> i've come up with a few ideas to meet some of these:
> 1) i think it would be a great idea to use the dom to make a hide/show 
> link for the revalidation options.  that way, only the address box and 
> submit button will be there, but the rest will be easily accessible

I've seen people experimenting with such Interface ideas for the 
validator in the past few days. I've seen the idea of using a tabbed 
interface to the results, and Nick, among others, did a mockup of DOM 
interaction to collapse/expand each section of the results page.

The problem with these is which default behaviour to choose. As far as 
I know a basic cookie mechanism would make it possible to remember 
layout settings from a validation visit to another. Other levels of 
customization involve complexities (user registration) we're not too 
likely to tackle any time soon.


> 2) the help text is a bit redundant, and takes up space.  i think it 
> could be fixed by adding an anchor link in it's place, and then only 
> having the text once on the page

As you may have seen, the text has been toned down in the 0.6.6 
release. It's certainly lighter now, though still redundant.


> when i have time, i'm going to create a full redesign of the 
> validator, instead of just the css

We have to be careful, though, that some people are using (scraping) 
the validator's HTML output with tools, and even though that output is 
not guaranteed to not change, we should be nice and not change it too 
much if that does not bring a serious gain.

-- 
olivier