Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Online Oultiners
Author: Oliver Wrede Posted: 4/13/1999; 8:06:28 AM Topic: Online Oultiners Msg #: 4968 (In response to 4962) Prev/Next: 4967 / 4969
how big of a leap do you think it is from this "tree-view" capability to actual, on-line outliningI don't have any idea. ;-)
As far as I can understand it, it is a problem of transport between the server (holding the content) and the client (displaying it). A "expand everything" can result in a quite huge download -- making the outline clumsy and sluggish. It could work well on a LAN maybe.
I did some experimtens with a hidden frame, through which I pulled contents from the server and then I used the "innerHTML" object to replace partial content in the visible frame ("innerHTML" is IE4-only I think).
Most of the examples I found require you to have out the complete structure in the page and the scripts just provide ways to hide and reveal specific parts of the whole structure.
Every expand action would have to be checked against structure on the server. Every click-to-edit in the text would have to automatically check out the object. That's a lot of traffic. I am not aware of what "persistent connections" could do here, but if the messaging between client and server could be solved in a "streaming" way (without permanent http requests which cause additional delay each time) I think there could be a lot of performance gain then.
Oliver
This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:49:19 PM.
© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.