Re: Functional problem with sort in threaded order

On Wednesday, Jan 18th 2006 at 15:47 -0800, quoth Michael Yount:

=>On 18 Jan 15:29, Steven W. Orr wrote:
=>> I showed them how much I liked mj2 but the response was that when we 
=>> display the archives in threaded order, there is no depth to the display.
=>
=>The code that sorts the messages and the code that displays the list of
=>messages are completely separate, so that information would need to be
=>passed from Mj::Util::sort_msgs to Mj::Format::archive somehow.
=>
=>More to the point, indenting the Subject in the current tabular format
=>of Mj2's archives probably wouldn't improve their appearance.


I agree that the appearance might be initially perceived as degraded but I 
claim that what we do now is inadequate from a functional perspective 
(which is always worse than appearance).

We currently provide four sorts: date, author, subject and thread. By not 
providing the indents, we sort the linear order of a thread sort but don't 
provide the metadata to allow people to see what it means. I see adding 
this as a big win. And people who don't like what it looks like probably 
don't want a thread sort in the first place.

Just a suggestion, but an alternate way to display a thread sort is to 
provide a bunch of plus signs and minus signs to "open" or "close" the 
sublist a la windoze file browsing.

Can i interest you in doing this? In your copious free time? ;-)

-- 
steveo at syslang dot net TMMP1 http://frambors.syslang.net/
Do you have neighbors who are not frambors?