Re: [Adonthell-general] website improvement (?)

[Kai Sterker]

On 21 Apr 2002 12:08:54 +0200 Alexandre Courbot wrote:

> What I think is that, for once, exceptionally, just for this time and
> without taking the habit, we could use these instruments of Satan that
> are javascript and popups. The .cgi would generate a little, well
> sized popup window with the instructions, and redirect you to the
> Savannah's packages (just as it does already). We could even use
> different popups for the different packages.

I thought about popups myself, but I don't know whether you can create
them from perl. The only way I know is to do something like

    print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
    print <some html that pops up the popup>

But when doing this, I can no longer redirect to the download by doing

    print "Location: http://freesoftware...";;

because everything printed after the very first line will be treated as
html. I tried closing and reopening stdout, forking a child process, but
nothing helps.


The only thing that would work is some javascript directly on the
download page. Something like

    function download (type)
    {
        open ("info.shtml", "info", "width=320, height=400");
        window.location.href = "../cgi-bin/dwnld.cgi?type";
    }

and further down

    <script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">
        <a href="javascript:download ('src');">Source</a>
    </script>
    <noscript>
        <a href="../cgi-bin/dwnld.cgi?src"><Source></a>
    </noscript>


But then the popup will only appear if people download from our site,
and not if they come from some external place that directly points to
the cgi script.


Are there any better solutions?


> Advantages:
> -people whose browser doesn't support Javascript will still be able to
> download.
> -people who hate popups and have disabled them won't be bored with
> them.-J.Random Player will hopefully read the text and appreciate this
> additional help.
> -either way, no one will have to spend one extra click to download the
> packages.
> -javascript would for once be usefull ^_^
> 
> Sounds fair?

Yeah. I tend to agree. A popup might be okay in our case. Especially if
people download from somewhere else, it would be odd if we'd redirect
them to our site. And at least, they have a chance to suppress the popup
if they want to.

Now there just needs to be a way to make it work ;).

Kai