[Design] Re: [cosmo] [proposal] Detail View

[Matthew Eernisse]

Comments inline, below.

Priscilla Chung wrote:
> This coming week Matthew is going to re-implement  the details view of 
> the web UI in order to support stamping for dashboard. He informed me 
> that he will have to start from clean slate.  From my understanding, the 
> amount of time to implement a layout identical to the desktop and time 
> to implement a proposal are about the same. 

The amount of extra effort to implement a simplified accordion widget 
for the detail-view in the Web UI is minimal.

There are some extra things we could do in terms of auto-detecting 
window size and making it smart enough to collapse sections 
automatically when appropriate (similar to the current minical sizing), 
that might add a bit to dev time. But those behaviors could be phased in 
-- and even the most basic, minimal approach is still better from a 
sizing perspective than the original, less Web-centric design.

> + Right now we have only three stamps, but there is no more space on the 
> horizontal 'mark up bar'. The proposed layout scales for addition 
> stamps, including other ideas such as annotations for read-only 
> collections, per a previous discussion on the design 
> list: http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2007-May/007059.html 
> ).

Longer-term, this issue will be huge. Generic items are a powerful 
concept, and the Web context really lends itself to the idea of mashups 
and plugins. Given that I have to build the sectioned detail-view form 
from scratch anyhow, I'd rather build in some design to accommodate more 
types of stamps than have to retrofit later.

> + The current layout which is adapted to the desktop is very tight—the 
> web app may have problems with different fonts and font size.

This is also really important. We have multiple fonts in multiple 
browsers on top of multiple operating systems. And we have no way of 
knowing how many extra rows of toolbars and button doohickeys people 
will have at the top of the browser window.

So anything we can do to facilitate some extra flexibility and give us a 
  little breathing room is really, really helpful. To me this seems like 
a simple, commonsensical way to deal with browser vertical-space issues.

>  From the very beginning Mimi and I agreed to keep the two applications 
> consistent, but only **where it makes sense**. This proposal is not 
> intending to create a unique web UI for the sake of it. We felt the web 
> app is a good way to try ideas out, where the desktop app lacked in 
> experimentation because it would longer and be prone to more bugs. 

The malleability of the Web UI affords us some opportunity to try some 
new ideas, and I think this idea is a good one.

+1 on implementing it the newer way.


Matthew