David Huynh wrote: > Exhibit tends to make your web pages look imposing with all the borders > and scrollbars on the facets. Boxy, utilitarian, rugged, not so calm and > graceful. > > I've just added support for dropping those borders and scrollbars (by > setting ex:scroll="false"). With this feature you can achieve a more > stylized page like this > http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/publications.html > which looks more like a web page than a web app. > > There are two caveats: > - A non-scrolling facet shouldn't have too many values (choices), or it > will take up too much space. > - Changing selection in one facet causes the other facets to update, > shrinking or growing in height, potentially causing loss of visual context. > > Comments are greatly appreciated!
My comments: - first and foremost, very nice! It is a great functionality to have and allows people to "tune" their visual appearance. So, big +1 to that. - it's true that the 'visual reshuffling' is somewhat more distracting. One way of reducing that is to make the transitions 'eased' (I know this might be a pain to implement, but maybe not if you use jquery). I'm not suggesting we make something like the 'xp explorer sidebar' where everything is eased and feels somewhat 'cheesy', but I think that 'boxed facets' helped because their boxes were not moving around and the 'moving' was concentrated in the item area, where people would expect it to be and learned to cope in the past. If there was a way to 'ease' the condensation of the facet boxes due to the disappearance of some facet values after a filter is selected, that would reduce the distraction (and feel just as a side effect). But I've no idea if this is feasible and how expensive it would be to implement and it would be just fine to drop it in case it gets too costy. - another distraction factor is the appearance of very bright checkboxes in front of all the list values. While I very much like the cleverness of the checkbox approach (that allows both single or OR-ed filtering), it has two problems: it's not so easy to discover (that clicking on the link is a single filter is an exclusive OR while clicking on the checkboxes is an inclusive OR) and it adds visual clutter. One option is to reduce the contrast: those checkboxes were designed for boxy-looking rectangles with whitish backgrounds, they pop up a little too violently on that page. Also, it's the opposite with the gray counters, which are fat (maybe use a thinner-feeling font for the counts?) but not very readable (low contrast). So I feel that by adjusting the constract of the checkboxes and the counters the distraction might be reduced. - I hate <hr> they're so '95 ;-) -- Stefano Mazzocchi Digital Libraries Research Group Research Scientist Massachusetts Institute of Technology E25-131, 77 Massachusetts Ave skype: stefanomazzocchi Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA email: stefanom at mit . edu ------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
