Re: lynx-dev frames, frames (was: longer.)

[Heather Stern]

Eduardo Chappa L. wrote:
> *** brian j pardy (address@hidden) wrote Today:
> 
> :) I'm highly considering making a patch for my personal use that will
> :) cause Lynx, whenever finding a frame titled "content", will jump
> :) directly into that frame, bypassing the previous page.
> 
>   I proposed in last march this feature, however I was answered the same
> way they answered you. How do you know that this is the frame you want to
> open? I would support something like this. Actually, if you do some kind of
> traversal and open all frames, nobody could complain, you would just make
> things slower, nothing more (ok, sounds crazy, but still doable if you
> display one page under another and make them easy to separate/distinguish).


It occurs to me that what I'd really prefer to see is the "obvious" frame 
(to me, that'd either be the one named aptly, or in absence of that, the one 
with the greatest percentage of screen estate assigned to it) to be displayed
instead of the lamer "your browser doesn't do frames" stuff (NOFRAMES) 
which used to commonly point to "get a newer browser" stuff.  This sounds 
similar to what Eduardo said, but I think it'd be easier to implement.
(To me, it sounds like Eduardo is requesting window-layout support, which
we seem not ready for quite yet.)  This would still be doable with the
stream of consciousness style of loading.

The point being, we'd act as if we do support frames (just like I've been
telling my buds for awhile -- it does, it does!  just more weirdly than
you had in mind.) so we should prefer content to the noframes content.
It's just, I'd kinda still like the option to see the NOFRAMES instead, 
in case that's where they decided to stash the better looking text-only 
links.  And it'd be fine by me if the other frames hotlinks were still 
there at the top.

Y'know, if we start doing this, then there are some sites, not that many
but a few, where the frames have frames inside of them.  Haven't looked
too closely at how the frame hotlink is wired.  But I could envision:

FRAME 10% to left: _nav_
FRAME (now displaying - see _NOFRAMES_): main 

 FRAME 10% to top: sponsor
 FRAME (now displaying - see _NOFRAMES_): main 

    [company logo}

        {picture of box} brand x is the best fubar making widget
        since sliced bread.  Now for our extensive line of toasters...
        ...bla bla ad nusea...
  

> Also if you gave a list (say under the title line) of the non-opened
> frames, it would be equivalent to the behavior that lynx has now, with the
> advantage of having at least one of the frames opened.

Another interesting possibility would be to preload each frame into the cache,
then offer a frame-fast-fetch on some keystroke+framenum key pair.  If we
know there are three frames, and we can use only one or two keys to switch
quickly among them, it would "feel" more like real frames support, even 
without complex windowing support.  (otherwise we have to cursor link to
them.  Ooo, do they count into the numbers on numbered links?  I never thought
of that before.  The frames as done right now are alsways the top few links
anyway.)  Err, tell me what you think, maybe all we need to do is make
it a little more obvious what keys already exist for fast frame access, and
the road to loading those a little more smooth.

* Heather * address@hidden * Starshine Technical Services *