Better discussion board
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I appreciate the work you're doing, but clicking on articles to skim them is a very jumpy experience the way the screen reorganizes. Why not display the first few lines (may be 350 bytes) of all messages? That would make reading through a discussion much better, and I bet reduce traffic. When posting an article the user can keep this in mind if there is not much to say then it will fit and no round-trip would be necessary.
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I appreciate the work you're doing, but clicking on articles to skim them is a very jumpy experience the way the screen reorganizes. Why not display the first few lines (may be 350 bytes) of all messages? That would make reading through a discussion much better, and I bet reduce traffic. When posting an article the user can keep this in mind if there is not much to say then it will fit and no round-trip would be necessary.
Good idea...
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Good idea...
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I appreciate the work you're doing, but clicking on articles to skim them is a very jumpy experience the way the screen reorganizes. Why not display the first few lines (may be 350 bytes) of all messages? That would make reading through a discussion much better, and I bet reduce traffic. When posting an article the user can keep this in mind if there is not much to say then it will fit and no round-trip would be necessary.
Yes, I don't like the "jumpy experience" either. In fact, it's plain painful. The idea of loading the initial nn bytes is good, but perhaps they could be displayed "tooltip"-style, when the user points at the link (use a DHTML layer or something with some script). Or, perhaps when a link is expanded, its entire subtree contents could be downloaded to the client. Expansions of further subtree elements is then handed on the client. For most discussion trees we're not talking about huge numbers of bytes so this seems workable. Heck, encode the discussion tree in XML and simply make an XSL style sheet to generate the client HTML... (ok, well, I guess not _everyone_ uses IE5 so its not _that_ simple).