Wiki/Report of Meeting 2024-03-28

Report of Meeting 2024-03-28

Present: Art Anger, Ed Gottsman, Raul Miller, and Bob Therriault

Full transcripts of this meeting are now available on the this wiki page.

1) Ed believes that the J viewer has matured to the point that there have been no further requests for features and he has had no ideas for future development. The recent forum posts have still not been incorporated, but this is a minor amount of information relative to all the forums posts.

2) Bob showed the effect of using the grid display contrasting between Newcomers https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Newcomers_N and the User page he has experimented with https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/User:Bob_Therriault/Newcomers. For most pages this is a luxury although it is a benefit for pages set up the way that the Newcomers page have been.

3) Bob showed the way that MediaWiki displays if it is not suppressed. Archive page https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Archived_Pages_R.11. Challenges are that the category tree display only shows the first 200 pages without letting the user know that there are more. On the unsuppressed category page there is at least a notification that there are more pages to view. Ed is still concerned about redundancy of the category tree display to the right and the unsurpressed category page display. Ed is wondering if there are options to do multi-column in the category tree. Bob does not think that this is possible. Ed's other concern is that the links to the sub-categories do not indicate how many pages you will see when you click on the link. Ed also wondered if only the categories and not the pages would show up in the category tree. This can be accomplished by setting the mode of the tree to "categories".

4) Ed wonders if it would be possible to have the category tree move to the left and then have it open up its subpages when it was selected. The tree would be preserved when you go the subpages. Bob believes that by going up the hierarchy he could retain the current state even though the subpages would be displayed. Raul thought that this could cause the list to grow very large. Bob thought that it would be possible to show only categories and have all the categories displayed in the same tree on every page. Although this tree would be large it would be consistent. This would appear on every category page, but not on other pages. Ed feels the sub-categories that are displayed on the category page are not required if we have them on the category tree representation. Bob will look into whether they can be removed. Bob wonders if the move to the left is necessary because it gets noisier when juxtaposed with the sidebar to the left. The category tree may live on the right to avoid this. Raul points out the the side bar can be made drop down in the most recent version of MediaWiki.

5) Bob had originally thought that the Home page would have the whole category tree but could have content that had descriptions of the different categories that might aid navigation. Ed wondered if that information could be displayed as tooltips on the category tree. Because the category tree is generated from the page names this is probably not possible. Bob thought that the newcomers information of how to get into J could take up less space on the page and would be near the top to make easy access. Below that could be a legend of the categories on that single page. Ed suggested that it may be possible to have the tool-tip on the category tree generated by a different field. If this were true and we could adjust that field then we could generate tooltips for the tree. Raul suggested an extension https://github.com/oOeyes/TippingOver that might allow us to go to a separate page with the extension of "/tooltip" Bob wondered if he set the tooltip for the link with the text of the tooltip and took out the category tree then he would have control over both the display of the categories and the subcategories and the tooltips that would be displayed. But you would lose having all the categories on all of the pages. (Editors note: you could have the full tree information with tooltips if you placed that global view above the automatically generated subcategories and the attached pages). Bob points out that tooltips work fine for a mouse, but not on touch devices like phones or tablets. Clicking on the top level could take you back to the home page which would have the categories written out without needing tooltips. Raul suggested a media query might allow you to display on a mobile device. Ed thought a button that you touch that would open a pop up. Bob wondered if expanded text might solve that possibly and eliminate the current redundancy. On Bob's iPhone a soft touch will open the page that the link would take you to as a pop up. Bob used the example of table of contents being able to be hidden until you click on it. Challenge is that that information would be stored with each page and this would mean a lot of pages to change to update the category descriptions. The approach may be to start with the main page with that display for a few months and then when the information has been vetted, the information might be added to the other category pages. Raul suggests perhaps a separate page for the information so that the home page is not too overwhelming. Ed says this could be done with a button above the tree display that would take you to the information page. The wiki main page is set up this way, although it hides a lot of categories that the information page would include. Consensus was that it should be tried on the home page and an information page would be added if necessary.

6) Take away thoughts are that it would be good to have the whole tree available on every category page, but that information pages would not have the category tree. Ed feels that every page should have a tree as a dissenting opinion. We can begin with category pages and decide whether there is a reason to add category trees to all pages in the future.

For access to previous meeting reports https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki_Development If you would like to participate in the development of the J wiki please contact us on the J forum and we will get you an invitation to the next J wiki meeting held on Thursdays at 23:00 (UTC) Next meeting is April 4, 2024.

Transcript

Okay.

So, Ed, do you want to lead off with anything on the JViewer?

Sure.

The viewer seems to have matured to the point where the only thing that changed in the last month was that I moved the viewer.db file and the log up to a user directory.

And otherwise, there have been no requests for changes and I haven't had any ideas.

The one big outstanding thing is indexing the forum, which I haven't tackled yet.

I feel bad about that. I remember that as a percentage, the forum posts that are not indexed are dwarfed by the forum posts that are indexed, so I don't feel too bad about that.

I will get to it at some point, but I'm not sure when. And that is it.

For the forum posts, I would say, if they're all occurring at the same rate, and they may well be, you've got on one side the forum posts between, I think about 2005 to the end of 2023, as opposed to the three months that we've gone through so far.

So, it's actually I think back to 1998.

Oh, that's right. You did pick up those other ones. Yeah.

So, yeah, it's the, yeah.

As a percentage.

Yeah.

Well, and as what, right now, if people were to look for it, they're as likely to go back and look at forums, recent forums. What they're not going to find is what you've already indexed.

I don't understand.

Well, they're not going to go back and look and say, I think somebody in 2002 said something.

They're going to look back, I think in the last month, I saw somebody say something about that, they'll find it easier, but it would be nice to get them on.

It would, and I will at some point, I've got other stuff I'm worried about at the moment so it's it's not at the top of the priority list.

Fair enough.

Okay, which brings me quickly over to the stuff that your comments about the redundancies of the pages, the category trees and the, the maintenance and all that.

I will take criticism on the grounds of tact, but I will stand by my position.

Your tact I thought was pretty good.

But, but I also received criticism pretty well.

So I don't know, you know, you might have had to be more tactful with somebody else but for me it's like, that's a good point I'm, you know, in any case they were really good points.

They were really good points, and although I was saying to Raul I haven't really done very much work.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about it. And I think I've come up with a way to approach this. So I will share my screen.

And, oh, a second.

I've got so many screens open, that it is the quickest thing for me to do is to go to this page I want.

Find the screen on it.

It'll open up and then when I go back to sharing my screen, it'll be the one that pops up, which is way easier than going through all these screens. There we go.

Okay.

So now I'm sharing the Welcome to J page for newcomers.

Yes.

One of the things I talked about a little bit last time but I didn't show was the way that I've made using grids, the way things can be responsive.

So, when I shrink this.

You should see things getting skinnier right.

Yes, yes. Okay.

You won't see any of the other stuff until I, well I'd have to go to showing my whole desktop to get some of the other effects. But what I did was using the grids.

I created this.

And you'll notice it's different layout. But the thing the reason it is a different layout is because as I scoot.

I can reduce the number of things.

Yeah, which I think is a lot nicer for.

It does end up with things being uneven. But that is one of the advantages of the actually look at this it, it actually orders things by color too but that's the hidden code for the color stuff that I think we're all once wondered about, and then it's all out of map again.

I just show that because that's something that grid can do, and it may be useful, even with when we get to tech stuff to be able to change the number of columns just by the width of the page.

So that when you're, say looking on a phone, you might see two columns instead of four columns of links.

But I think that's a useful thing to put in, because I think the more you can move the information up the page and put it on a page to less scrolling you have to do.

Unfortunately, with a narrow with a phone you can't do too much about the fact you're going to have fewer columns than you would with a with a wider page but you can at least scrolling is so easy on a phone.

I'm sorry we're all good. I just said you can tip the phone sideways if you really want to.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you can do that too. And do the same thing with the with the iPads and stuff so you get a little bit of the effect but I just think that this is kind of neat to have it responsive that way.

Then the next thing is looking at the, the wiki homepage.

Actually I'll go back to this. This is what I'm proposing, instead of this which is how the community pages were set up before we took the lines off the around the boxes and stuff but this is just more just showing you what I've an example so this is got the usual

extra information in here, a table of contents and the tree up here.

When you go to this.

I've actually changed this archive page so now what it does is it actually shows the pages, the way media wiki wants category pages to be shown.

And that is, it will allow you a space to put information up here, which is all this information here.

So I've overridden and taken on that that it section. But what it does unless you suppress it. And on the other page I have suppressed it, but unless you suppress it, it actually displays subcategories, and all the pages that have the link to the category.

So, in a way, it's doing what this box over here could do.

And the reason for that.

The one thing this box over here has an advantage of is when I click down here.

Yeah, actually you can see it here although in other pages for more pronounced.

The only pages that show up here are the ones that have the category archives on them.

These pages are ones that have the category essays on them.

In other words, unless these pages had archived added to them.

They're not going to show up down here. But you could, you could list, you could take all these archive pages level down and give them all that that category, and then they'd all show up under archives, but you can, you do have more information for subcategories

here. There we go there's historic.

You've got way more stuff and historic here that are all and that's a link to all the pages.

Yep. Sorry, go ahead. No, you go ahead.

Why wouldn't I just want that hierarchy on the right.

What, what is the value of subcategories on the left.

Subcategories on the left, is that you may not want to be overwhelmed with. If we say put every page here.

That is attached to all these.

You would have.

So what we would we would need to do is we would have to go down to all of these pages and and put archives on as a category on them.

And then in here, you would have all of these pages show up as archives.

So there would be a lot of links there. It would be a flatter organization, but you would have and it would be sorted as you can see alphabetically here.

I'll show it for you, but it's alphabetically on the title of the page.

So wait a minute. So, the hierarchy the tree on the right is only showing hierarchies or is it also showing pages.

These are all pages showing categories or is it showing pages, it's showing both.

Okay, it's it's showing categories these things with the, with the arrows.

And then these are all just pages. Right.

So when you ask about the.

Yeah. Yeah, so the advantages.

I don't know what the advantages. I mean if you showed if I were on the orphans page instead of the archives page.

Yeah, I'd see a boatload of pages, even in the current format on the left, right.

So if I go there at least 30 days there for example, right so if I click on the orphans page I think you'll see what you would see.

Right.

So it seems we're willing to live with an overwhelming number of pages I guess is my point.

But you're all these pages are in orphans.

This is 200 pages out of 506.

Yeah.

Basically, yeah, I understand that but he's making a more general point which is sometimes a category will have lots of pages.

And my point is, I don't need to open up all the categories just the one or the ones I'm interested in and if one of them is orphans.

It doesn't really matter whether I'm looking at it this way, actually I'll qualify that in a moment.

It doesn't matter whether I'm looking at it this way, or in a hierarchical list, most of whose entries are still collapsed, and only orphans is open.

Now the nice thing about this is it's multi column.

Yeah, what are the, are there options for doing multi column with that tree browser on the right in the, if we go back to archives it still shows up I guess doesn't have room to show up here.

Yeah, actually I just haven't put it up there it would, if I chose to I could put it in there.

I don't believe that massively redundant.

So I'm still back on that point, I guess.

It's, um, it is redundant.

But it gives you like, it feels redundant very massively redundant on the archives page and I guess you could make the argument that there probably should be.

No pages attached to the archives page they should all go to the subcategory pages.

If that's what you're saying.

Oh, no, I mean I'm, I am willing to distinguish between curation on the one hand and presentation on the other. I'm not going to second guess your curation decisions by any means.

But I should know I'm not, but I think the presentation is open for discussion at this point.

If I decide to look at orphans.

Yep. Whether by opening up this node on the right, the orphans node, or by going to the orphans page.

I am signing up for a boatload of information, and it doesn't accept that the page oriented presentation shows it to me in three columns.

It doesn't really matter which or which presentation I see.

And if it doesn't really matter.

And again, that's not 100% true but let's just stipulate it for a moment if it doesn't really matter, then there's no point in showing it in two different ways.

And I would argue will be happier just showing it as part of a tree that can be explored.

Now, that said, and this is the qualification.

The single column presentation is deeply unpleasant.

And I think a three or four column presentation on a screen this wide would be more appropriate. I don't know how to do that, or whether it's possible.

Yeah, I'm going to just check on one thing.

Because there is one other difference that might be there.

Yeah, okay so

I think, I think there's a.

I think there's a challenge with the orphans page and that you only get to see up to I unless you go to next page.

And I think, I think there's a flaw with the category tree view, because in this.

If it showed you everything I'd have no argument with it, it cuts you off here, but doesn't tell you why.

Yeah, that sucks.

Yeah.

Let me ask you this.

Is there a presentation.

So on the right.

Yeah, the tree view mixes categories and pages.

Yes. Is there a presentation.

That just shows a category tree, but not pages.

Yeah, shows the pages separately into the right. Yeah, I can do that.

Do you have that handy or that's just something that's just a change with edits, I think.

If I

I'm in the back of what I call it.

It's not all it's not pages.

Just give me a second. It's just a matter of finding. Yeah.

It's just a matter of finding

back to my content creation page.

Category.

Good somewhere in here was categories.

Probably on Easter, maybe the day before.

Mode pages all our categories that's what it is. Okay, so let's go back here and call it categories.

Categories.

No preview.

And now you've got the categories, no pages.

Alright so what happens if I pick a category.

You would go straight to the page of the category if I clicked on that.

That's not so interesting.

I guess what I was hoping for.

Let me see if I can describe it properly.

Suppose we took the tree on the right and moved it to the left margin.

Okay.

So clicking on a category in that category entry in that tree would show the page titles on the right in three or four columns.

Do you see what I mean.

Ah, yes.

Basically you can navigate the category tree by clicking on triangles opening up subcategories and clicking on a category entry will show you all the pages but doesn't take you anywhere.

You don't lose your context.

Okay.

I'm just thinking.

That's a very standard interaction.

Yeah, so what you're saying is if we move this over to the other side to this side.

So just to show the flow sort of. And then when you were to click here.

What are you going to see.

Basically, you'll see just the pages section.

So, I'm not sure if this is what you're saying, but this is what you're saying.

I'm assuming where it says pages in category archives. Yeah, I would say pages in category orphans, because that's what you just clicked on.

Right.

So, maybe you can get that effect. Just by going to another page but preserving the tree on the left. Well, that's what I'm going to show you that tree. Yeah, actually, that's what I was thinking.

And I sort of half right. Right. But what you're saying is on this page, I'd want a category tree on the right selected.

With with orphan selected on the left, not sure whether I can fight the selection, but all I need to do is create a category tree, one level up.

So you could get back to where you were.

Does that make sense.

Well, in an ideal world, it would be exactly the same category tree on every page with the selection and the open super categories preserved.

So it would seem as if you weren't going anywhere.

Your category hierarchy would be present state would be preserved. And all that was changing was you'd be seeing different page entries on the right.

On the body of the page. Yep.

I do that. Let's go back to the wouldn't that rapidly become very, very large.

Yeah, well, what become large, the tree.

Because you never pruning anything off the tree. And we've got thousands of pages. This would be a big thing.

Thousands of pages is OK, because you're only ever showing at most a couple of hundred at a time.

Only if you don't scroll.

No, I mean, you're you're only showing one categories pages at any given moment.

But even like orphans has more than 200. So how would you show more than 200 of the orphans.

Oh, yeah, that's right. That's a challenge. I don't know.

But if we didn't show the pages in the category tree.

Right. That's the point. Yeah. So this is what if you put that on every tree on every page.

Oh, there you go. Yeah. Just expand the whole thing. Yeah. Except in this case, it's only showing categories.

Exactly right. So this would be outrageous. That's not really wonderful. You can scan it very nicely.

Yes. You also want anchors so that you scroll the right part within the tree when you go to the next page.

That would be ideal. Yeah. I don't know how you do that.

Actually, I'm not sure you can because you want to show the top of the list of pages.

So it's tricky.

Yeah, I think we'd have to have an anchor. And I don't think that the media wiki would do that without an extension.

And we haven't yet come up with a way of writing our own extensions.

Yeah. And I kind of.

I'm my feeling is if you click on a category here and you go to it, you probably want to go to the top of the page in the category not drop down to where you were on the side on what effectively is a sidebar.

It's not it's not ideal, but I don't think it's fatal either.

I guess. Yeah. Well, no, you think that.

Yeah, I guess you want the position on the new page to be set to match it to the page. You wouldn't want that jump.

But having that what would actually happen instead without anchors is you would go to the top of the page, which is neither of those two.

Yes, that is, I mean, in the general case behavior. Yeah, that is the behavior you'd see in the general case that's right. And we'd have to work on that we'd have to see how annoying that turned out to be and whether there was some way of mitigating it.

The thing, if I get what you're talking about the thing that works in the favor of having everything expanded is, it would be the same on every page.

Yes. So in other words, you wouldn't be looking at a different tree. Right, so you'd know where you were looking for.

Yeah, the only problem is if you pick the category from the bottom of the list. Yeah, you jump to a target page with the same tree on it, which is good.

But the bad thing is you'd come to the top of the page.

So your category tree would jump.

And that might be annoying. Yeah, I think that's Rose point yeah and that is my reaction is it might be but let's try it and maybe, maybe it won't be so bad.

Well, to give an example, although the archive pages, we haven't done anything with the tree yet. But if I click on this now.

It's going to effectively. Okay, let's let's.

We'll go back but I'll click on the archive page and that's what you're going to see.

Yeah, except you wouldn't see subcategories anymore it's pointless.

Right, because I think you're still going to see them because it tells you it's always going to tell you that there are no subcategories, I can look into see if there's a way to override that there might be.

Okay, but I what I'm saying is that the subcategories subhead in the body of the page. That's all irrelevant now, because the subcategories are adequately reflected in the tree, all we need to see are the page title.

That's true.

Yeah, okay well I'll see what I can see again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The other thing I was going to show you is.

And this is another example of, of what it would look like if instead of going to archive you see when I go back. This is one positive thing about it.

I go back to this, and it's taken me right to where I was again.

It didn't jump. When I do that. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, yeah, but this is the other way is you go straight to the subcategory.

And now I'm on the page with all the all the pages.

Right.

And orphans has no subcategories and that's why we're not seeing any, we're not seeing that heading. Exactly. So the, the.

Well, it, ideally, when I go to.

When I go to a page like this that has both subcategories.

Excuse me, and pages.

Ideally, I want to take the subcategories off, I'll always have that tree on the side with the categories.

Exactly.

So I'm going to do that.

And I do that. Let's see, I'm just thinking, I can, I can actually yes I can take. I can take both subcategories and pages out.

If we decide that we're only going to have pages hanging off the, the leafs hanging off the last note of the tree.

I don't know whether we want to do that but if we did that, then I don't have to display any of this at all.

You just get the tree.

And then when you click on subcat, you get down to the lowest level and subcategory, say, technology.

It's going to take me right here, and I'm going to see the pages on technology.

And still you'll see the tree but it might have jumped up.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think that it's worth trying.

And what's the feeling about only attaching pages to the last level of.

No, I think, I think the pages should be attached to any level of the tree as they are now.

Okay, so if we go that route.

Then, then, then the question is, you're saying take the subcategories out of this.

Yeah, I don't know whether it's feasible that presentation is feasible or not I'm not a media wiki person.

But that subcategories heading in the body of the page is redundant. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then you'd have your, your, your, your links all the way down the side.

Yeah, yeah.

Now, the year.

You're set on on moving it to the left, because you know right to left reading and stuff.

We've already got a sidebar on the left.

Fair point. Yeah, I don't think it's terribly important, but it was just my first instinct.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no I get it. Yeah. But to me if we if we put sidebar and then this on every page I think that that gets noisy.

That's entirely possible. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that.

I think that's a good way to do it. The thing I really like about this is it does solve the problems of maintenance.

Yeah, exactly. You don't have to put archives down in all the subcategories.

Yeah, and you don't need exactly and you don't need to do a description and all the subcategories, you're relying on the fact that if I click on orphans.

There's the name of your pages.

Yeah.

And it tells you right now that the other thing I do like is it tells you that there are more than 200 pages.

So there is the next page.

Yeah, and that that page would also have the hierarchy, the category hierarchy on it.

Um, yes, it would because orphans page has it. So when we switching views we're really just switching views on the same page.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, all the pages would have the would have the category tree there.

Um, yeah, okay. So that's, I like this better than the idea I came up with but that's, that's the way it usually works.

Well, I'll tell you when mine was similar. And so I'll go back to

So, what my plan had been is I thought okay if we make this the homepage.

What I really want to do is have that map of all the how this whole place is set up on this page.

And I thought, well, if I do that.

Really, all I want to do is I would probably put the welcome to Jay and the links to get started with Jay up high but not as big.

So the first thing you see is if you're new to it. The first thing you're going to see is how to get into it how to find out about it.

But most of the page would be what you've described as your tree down the side which I really like.

But I was going to just do as one page that you'd have to maintain that basically had columns and we might still do that on this page of have columns of all these categories with descriptions.

I see, because that's where you could put descriptions.

Let me ask you this. Yeah.

Can you put tooltips on the category entries in the hierarchy tree.

I don't believe so because it's generated.

Okay.

See if I, I shouldn't say that they're they're they're generating the tooltips.

I'm seeing tooltips right now. Yeah, but those are generated tooltip. They're generating generate different tooltips. Could you generate descriptions is my question. Yeah.

I don't think I can I haven't looked into that. What I did look into what I did find is let's see if I go to archives, we can see it again.

Oh yeah, okay so reference archive pages.

What I found that was interesting is you see these subcategories are ordered zero one and two.

Yeah.

What those are is when I go to a page, and I want it to be in a different order than alphabetic.

I am pinned a number to it.

When I append the number it orders according to the number.

So, what I did to give myself space is I didn't want to, you know, just go 123.

Because, how do you insert something in between. So what I did is I said okay I'm going to leave spaces for, say on this case I think I left 24, maybe I did 30.

So I did 06 12 1824. Well, this is why you see this, what it displays is just the first digit of these.

So in the same way this just displays the first letter of this.

So you would see a written thing beside the subcategories, tell you what you were dealing with.

But that's what those numbers are in the same way with the letters so they're just taking the very first letter number, even though they are actually using the ordering.

I'm distinguishing here between say oh four and oh eight.

Right.

So it's it's reading it. It's just not displaying it.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

That sounds like work.

Well, doing it that way is work, but the thing I like about your, your other your approach with having the tree on the side is on this page, you could basically in this area down here, which would be the main part of the page, you'd make the, you would take the

getting started link and you put it up high and you might shrink this down and put it in the corner.

So in the main part of the page, you would have this, but you would you would actually do it in a format that might be.

What can I say, the thing I was thinking is, you'd have all these categories, but you might have them so they're expandable. So if you click on them it opens up when what's underneath them.

And then what's underneath that would be an explanation but what you should expect to see in that category.

So, you know, you wouldn't be able to get all of that explanation on every other page.

Right.

That's the only page where you'd have that.

If you went to the other pages, you would always be able to get back to it by hitting this. Right. But you wouldn't get all of that explanation on every other page.

Right.

That you could adjust and I think it's it's work you do once.

And it's like a legend. Once you establish the legend, you can go in and change it. But you don't have to very often.

No, it occurs to me that there is a category page associated with each category. Is that correct or not?

Yeah, that's exactly right.

All right. And you can apply, you can attach text to it arbitrary text to each category page.

Correct.

It might be worth looking into where that tooltip comes from.

Because it's conceivable that you could have that there's a field you could put on each category page that would supply the tooltip text for the tree entries.

I suggest this. I do not know.

Yeah.

I have been looking at that. I'll tell you why I've been looking at it is because what I was actually hoping my second choice was you'll notice this in the category tree is archived pages are 11.

That is his actual name up here.

Yeah.

But I've renamed it.

I like renaming it because I don't want to see all the business of that are 11 stuff and everything like that, of course.

But what I had been hoping and what I tried to look into is whether there's a way to force this not to go by the name of the page, the actual name of the page, but to give the title of the page for lack of better term.

And there hasn't been to this point.

So what is coming up I can't see it on my category.

Yeah, basically, it's just a mirror of what you see is archive pages are 11.

That's what shows up in the tooltip.

I see. Yeah, just the same information on a tooltip.

So it's not really useful. So I'll look into seeing whether I can do tooltips. See the other thing I could do is if I can change what that tooltip displays.

Then, if I add the description to the archives here what you should be seeing, it would come up on the tooltip.

Right, that would be cool. Yeah, that would be cool.

Because not only would you see the proper the title of the page for lack of a better term, but in that title would be a description of what the sort of things you'd see on the page.

Yes, and that would be a lot less work than maintaining a multi column table.

So the multi column table you're talking about is back at the homepage back at the homepage. Yeah, I'm trying to avoid that work. That's all.

Something that doesn't require as much manual intervention is what I'm looking for. So you could put a description on every category page in some field that would be used to generate the tooltip.

Yeah, that strikes me as less work than maintaining a formatted table.

Right. And if there was a way to do that.

There sort of is. Okay, I just posted to chat and extension, which almost does it's work slightly differently than what I described but it is something quite similar.

Basically, there's a separate page that contains the tooltip.

Or you can structure it in different ways but that's the default here.

Let's do it. Are you guys seeing that change.

No, no. Okay, so I opened it on my page so I'm looking at it right now.

Oh yeah I did open a different window. Okay.

So what it does.

So, just reading through it. Explain to begin what it does is it creates.

It creates tooltips for page links for which the page links based on a in the default configuration at least based on a separate page which has the same page with slash tooltip added on.

Oh, okay.

Pages, including category pages. I don't know if you would have to create a category page with slash tooltips.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, make sense.

And you probably want to get in category because you don't want that showing up other places.

The advantage of that is that even if I were down in some other category page somewhere I could still see the descriptions of each category in the tree.

I wouldn't have to go back to home to get that information. Right.

Well, no. Okay. So, in that sense, what I was thinking is.

Okay, let me think about what I was going to do this. Okay.

If I, and this is this is a little more work, but it's not a lot more work.

I'm just going to save chat so we don't lose that link.

What if.

What I did in my multi column here is all the links to the categories, but the same way as these links are working. This says J playground.

But when you can't see the link because it's too small, but underneath it actually displays the categories as category J playground and dot one.

But the title is J playground.

Yeah.

So, I don't understand. Okay, well what it means is I could display this as you're going to J playground. That's all you need to see the category page of J playground, and I could click on it.

It's going to take you to J playground title is different.

The category page is the same as what the link is, but the title is different.

So what I, what I would do is I would put the text of this into

this as the tool tip because I can do that.

And so what would happen is, you'd have a tool tip that would tell you the information about what you would see a J playground.

Right now it says the link but I don't need I don't think I need to do that.

And I would just take what was actually on the page for J playground, and I would transfer it here. So I'm glad it didn't do two places but it's the same information.

Sure, but I can only see it when I can only look at.

You will see it when you're on the page or not. These are not category links. These are page links right.

What I'm on right now is a category link J playground is a category link, I created a category for J playground.

Okay. Well, so the problem here is there's two problems here.

One is if I'm looking at the right margin at the tree in the right margin and I'm scanning down, and I see frameworks.

And I think, huh, wonder what that is.

And I have to move my mouse over to the center of the page and find frameworks in this multi column table that you've created and hover in order to get my tool tip.

And that doesn't seem like a good interaction. Okay, what I can problem.

Well, for that actually thinking about this, I would actually be inclined to take the, the category tree display out of this page.

I see. I'd replace it with the columns in the middle. Yeah. Okay, then the second problem is if I am in some category page somewhere like reference.

Yeah, where I do see the tree. Yeah.

And I'm curious about what essays is, or what scripts are the only way to find out more information, hovering won't help.

Right, I can either follow the link, or I can go back to home.

My tree disappears I get this completely different arrangement of categories in the form of this multi column table, and I go and try to remember what it was I wanted was it scripts, where is that exactly.

Yeah, this seems like a poor interaction.

Yeah, I take your point.

If

what if you're say on the reference page.

Yeah, what you will see at the top of the reference page is what you would see for the, the same thing you would get if you hovered it at back at the home page.

But if you were on the essays page.

Well okay so I guess let's let's go to archives because that's probably the best example.

We'll go to archives.

And then, what you would have to put in would be not for the pages because these pages.

Now the pages would still exist.

It just wouldn't be in the category. See what that we were sort of building it back to the redundancy again, because what I was going to say is each of these subcategories I could do the same way, except with an explanation they're not there.

They're not there anymore. Yeah, you're saying take them out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, remove them, because that's redundant with the tree display on the right.

Yes.

And we get so much. The advantage of the tree display on the right, the way we're going to do it is it's got everything there.

Right.

It's not like this. Yeah, and it's it's structures there and everything. So we would want that there. See, if, if you just went with this information and took this out you could do it.

You're not redundant anymore. But I think you've got more work for upkeep, and you lose the window on the rest of the, the tree, I don't, I don't know if there's more work on upkeep I assume this is generated automatically.

Well, except for the 012 business.

Yeah, except for the 012 well does. Yeah, the 012 business is generated automatically but it's based on what you've put in.

But, but you do lose the structure the global view, you lose the global view you lose the ability to know what's there.

All you see is orphans are 11.1.

Yeah. And so what I was saying is, you could replace that with what you put on the main page for this subcategory.

So you're seeing a, there is redundancy on this page for subcategories.

You would see what the subcategories are, they would be an explanation of what they were.

That's nice but what if I'm what I'm interested in is a super category. I'm looking at the tree I'm looking all over the tree I'm not particularly focused necessarily on subcategories of the category page I happen to be on.

Right.

So, well, okay so as an example if I go back to the, I decide I'm in the archive pages now.

This isn't the way this is going to work so imagine this has all the categories on it because that's what we're going to do.

And I go back to my reference page which has the reference categories, this was still have all the categories. Yes, but here. I haven't done this with yet, it would have all these as subcategories.

The subcategories of this page would all show up here with explanations about what they were.

I'm not sure about the subcategories of this page I mean maybe I'm not interested in any of those maybe I'm interested in some other category that caught my eye in the tree.

Well what I'm saying is any category you went to would have a description of what its subcategories were in the subcategories area, you're back to where we were, I mean you're back to where we are, you're showing all the subcategories of the category.

Yeah, okay, let me let me try it this way.

I could be sitting on a subcategory page. Yeah.

I could be interested in a category that is distant from my current subcategory page, I see it, it catches my eye. Oh, interesting open GL I wonder what the hell's going on there.

Open GL is not a subcategory of the current category I can't see a description of it. My only choice is to what, go to the open GL page which we're trying to avoid we want to give you a little bit of information we don't want you to have to go anywhere.

I can go back to, I can go to the super category of open GL which is graphics presumably.

And then go look and that's stupid. I mean I'm again going somewhere which is what we're trying to avoid. Yeah. So I'm a little, I'm a little skeptical.

I'm skeptical of the idea that we can solve this problem by just putting subcategory descriptions on every category page. There's no particular reason if I'm looking at the whole outline why, what, why I might be attracted by a subcategory of the current category, versus any other category perhaps far distant in the hierarchy.

Okay, so what I'm what I'm proposing is you will go to the thing you're interested in.

If you're interested in open GL, you're going to click open you're going to open the open GL category. Oh, well then there's, there's no point in showing preliminary descriptions there's no point in tooltips or anything else if the answer is you're interested in the category

based on its name and nothing else go there. That solves the problem. We don't need tooltips we don't need descriptions.

Well, I think you still need.

When you go to that. Okay.

The.

I see what you're saying, the level at which you'd have a description is, is either going to be that homepage which has all the descriptions, or when you go to the particular page, it will have a description of that page, probably in this area up here.

And it'll have a description of these guys in some kind of a column based thing.

And then underneath it it'll have the links all the pages pages won't have descriptions you want to, you'll have to go there to find out what's there.

I think that's still a lot of redundancy. I mean you're showing me subcategory labels in the body of the page that I can also see in the outline on the right.

And there's no reason why.

In principle, again I don't know what extension might do this or whether it even exists. There's no reason in principle why those descriptions couldn't be supplied by tooltips on the category tree entries.

I don't understand why the body of the page has no I put that information. I agree with you if there's a way to do it for for tooltips to generate it off the category tree.

That's a good way to do it.

I mean that that solves your look ahead problem, essentially.

I think so. Yeah, I think so. Um, and it would also mean you wouldn't need a table on the top most category, the homepage, because that that table of that multi college descriptions.

You don't need it because all those descriptions are sitting in the tree on the right, you can easily get them. Yeah.

I'm just thinking, back to the iPad and the phone. How do you do to tips on them. Do you hover in the end it'll do it. Oh, the perennial question. Yeah, that's, that's tricky. I don't know.

I don't know.

Long press. I have no idea. Yeah, I don't know either I'll have to look into that if there's a way to do it then the tooltips is a good solution.

But there would be where you would have a reason at least to go to the have the homepage, the information is there.

Yeah, there's, there is an option and you'd always be able to go to the top of your category tree and click on it and it would take you back to the homepage.

But if you can do a tooltips. I think that's better.

Modulo the iOS, Android problem.

Yeah.

Now the other thing I was going to mention you said you're seeing the same subcategories as the tree view on the, on the right.

You are in this case but that's because this isn't what we're going to end up showing what we end up showing is the whole tree, and then the subcategories will be different than what you see in the whole tree, there'll be part of the whole tree, but there will be a reason.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no but I would submit that if I can see them in the tree there's no reason to see them abundantly in the body of the page, and then it's a matter of finding perspective.

Yeah, no I agree with you and it's just a matter of finding if there's a way to take subcategories out and only show pages and in this in the category.

Yeah, implementation is a whole separate discussion. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But you know what it might be as simple as some tricky little CSS thing because I can take both of these out that's what I was doing when I was hiding them.

I was just, I was displaying none and they disappear.

So there may be a way to differentiate between subcategories and pages. And if I do display none for subcategories, maybe it goes away and that's it.

And then then, then all you see is the pages, you've got your tree for the categories. And then it's a matter of just see whether we can generate tooltips for the categories, and whether tooltips are effective on a phone or a touch device.

The possibility would be.

No, I guess you don't want to make the titles, a lot longer than they currently are the category titles.

You do a media query to do to display that tooltips in some other form on a mobile device, but you're right that mobile devices don't do touch tips very well.

Yeah, that's true.

Yes, you could have a separate control a button next to each small button next to each category entry.

It would show you a pop up.

Yeah, that's one way to do it. You could.

Another way to do it is you can do the expand compress stuff.

So it's not that work.

What's that.

How would that work.

Oh, I think I'm just trying to think of where we most recently used that.

Yeah, so what you can do is what what you can you can you can change the icon, but next to it would be an icon and when you clicked on it, it would open up and show you the text underneath.

Yes, close it again. Yeah.

It just moves it doesn't do a pop up it actually changes the display of the page.

I understand so you could actually have several open at once if you want it.

Yes, absolutely. You can. Yeah.

Yeah.

That's done with tables.

Yeah.

So another another possibility.

But yeah, it looks, it really looks as if we might be able to squeeze out all the redundancy.

Third normal form for the display.

Yeah.

I was just playing a little bit on my iPhone with the touch and if I, if I do a soft touch on a link. It actually opens up like a page that would be the link.

And then ask me if I actually want to open it.

Well, that's interesting.

That's just on my iPhone so that might be the way they get around it.

Yeah, but that just you're still going to the page you're just not really leaving the page you're on, unless you want to write you're popping up the page.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which I think is actually a nice way to do it.

Because you get to see the whole thing you're looking at no that's not what I want you to say no no bother you're back to where you were right.

Exactly. Exactly.

Zero cost in some sense in terms of disorientation and recovering your. Yeah, yeah.

It's like click click. Next, click, click, next click.

Yeah.

Um, cool. Well, as usual, my job angrily to point out challenges and somebody else's job to do the actual work. Excellent.

We can yeah.

No, no apologies because you've given me something to that's better than what I come up with, that's, there's no.

We'll see about the implementation. Yeah, the implementation may be a different thing.

But I certainly like the.

I certainly like having the entire tree on each page.

Yeah, it, it really is. It's it makes it a lot easier to get out and get around where you want to.

And then, so, if we could do tool tips that would be ideal except for iOS and Android devices.

If they have a way of doing what my iPhone does. That's not really a bad idea.

A possibility would be a button on the whole tree.

At the top of the tree, and you tap it, click it, and it expands horizontally and shows descriptions.

Yeah.

For everything. Yeah, yeah.

We're almost certainly past what extensions can do for us, but just as a, as a thought.

Yeah.

What about, what about this.

And it would be something that would be on every page, I think still better.

But I think that if we had an expand thing that came off the tree, and then showed like the whole list of everything with their explanations, and it showed up.

Yeah, that's what I'm imagining. Yeah, exactly.

But it would, it would disrupt this page, because it's going to put it right beside here so suddenly you're going to have as many entries for the whole tree.

Yeah, you'd have as many entries as the whole tree, and it would basically show up beside the whole tree.

Yeah, the whole tree would expand to include additional information. Well essentially what I would do is my my expansion would be the button next to the tree.

And that expansion opens that whole thing up. Yes, exactly.

Okay, exactly. That's probably more doable.

Really cool. Well, because it's a table that sits beside the tree and it's hidden until you click on it.

I see.

I mean it's kind of the same as the was I with this, I think it was when I was in community.

It's kind of the same idea is what's going on here with hide.

You can hide contents you can show contents, right.

The only problem is I think you'd have to create it manually.

Yeah, you would, but you'd only have to do it once.

Yeah.

And then, and then that would be the same information that would be back on your main page.

But it really sitting like a little button here above this.

You click on this, and then this would expand. And that's what would show up.

Yeah.

And it would have all the information. What's that.

The entries still be clickable in their expanded form. Yeah, you can do that. Absolutely.

Right.

Essentially what you would be is duplicating here.

The tree, not just community see tree but the whole tree, you'd be doing it here with with with explanations. Right, that would go on every page.

But it would be the same information as you would have on the homepage.

If you made a big change, you wouldn't be changed, I'll have to look and see whether there would be a way that you could maintain it in one place.

And then just have it look at the information for the other place.

Yeah, because it lives on the page it would, it would have to be stored with the page, I think.

Any ideas in that role.

Unless we're prepared to write extensions. And that's a debugging problem that we're not currently set up to handle. Yeah.

And I suppose the other thing is, or the way to approach it might be to trial, the descriptions on the main page for the first couple of months, where you can change everything easily once.

And then the work. Once you were fairly sure you're going to be changing all the descriptions, or most of the descriptions, then you would go to each page, each category page that would have the tree on the side.

And you would be able to, you would put the description next to each of those.

You know what,

the descriptions are going to be, you know, half three quarters a whole sentence, each.

Yeah.

They're going to significantly disrupt the page.

As the tree expands to accommodate the descriptions.

We just know I mean they will take up half or two thirds of the page easily.

It'll, it'll extend down the same way that.

Oh no no no no no no no no, because that, that would be a really bad disruption.

Well, I think what I would like to suggest.

This is contrary to my usual philosophy about these things but I think it makes sense.

When you expand. You don't expand, actually, the tree.

What you do is you go to the tree description page, which is a whole page dedicated to one line descriptions of each of the categories.

Okay. Yeah, it's clickable. And you can click on it, you can either click on the button again to go back to your original page and shrink the tree, or you can click on a category because the description looks really interesting and will take you to that page, and you'll be back looking at the narrow tree in the margin in the right margin again.

But we dedicate a whole page to expansive one line descriptions ideally one line obviously on a phone that might not work, but expansive ideally one line descriptions of each of the categories.

Okay, so we don't even try to live on the page with the content we just say screw it it's another page I'm sorry.

What if I had that on this homepage.

Yeah, it's up to you. I mean maybe it is the homepage I don't know that's what I'm saying is, if you put it on that that page becomes the homepage, whatever tree you're on you click home and you're here.

That makes sense. Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

So, essentially what we're saying is on the tree if you're interested in something you click on the homepage, and then bang there's all the descriptions, you just have to go back to where you were before.

Yeah, I think, I think that works. I think that works. Okay.

You don't need to worry about tooltips.

And if you're interested in a category, you go to the homepage you can see them you go back to the category.

Yeah, you've got an extra step.

You do have an extra step.

Is that digestible enough for a homepage.

Sorry, what's that. Is that digestible enough for the homepage.

Is what it just digestible, is that digestible. Yeah, is it, is it, is it feeding the person information at a comfortable speed for people who would visit the homepage

on their own. Yeah.

Well, and the alternative that is, I guess what Ed was suggesting is that you

the homepage what we're seeing here becomes a splash page.

And they're underneath instead of having all those links, there's text explaining to you the best way to access the information in the wiki is to go to this page which will be all the links that we're saying.

And then you can add an extra layer so that this this layer is a bit friendlier than seeing all those things.

I guess it depends on how I when thinking about is how much content goes on the homepage.

You know, my impression is that the homepage should be, you know, a very high level summary of the site.

And it sounded like this was going to be something for all of the categories.

Yeah, that's a great point. And I guess where I would come out on that is that this is not the homepage so this is not the home link in the tree.

There is a button above the tree that says, you know, descriptions are expanded view or something like that. Okay. And that is a dedicated non home page that shows you the tree with the one, one sentence descriptions for each item.

I think you're right, this might be a little much the homepage. And just to well refute a little bit. The current main page.

Looks like this.

So basically it's.

And this is this hides a lot from you, you click on, you have to click through these to find out where they are. But essentially this is the first level of subcategories for the wiki.

As they were written.

So the homepage for the, the, the actual old wiki was exactly this.

Right. But that's still not all of the categories. It's not all of the categories so that we, we gain by putting the category down the side.

And, and you're right it's not all of the categories, and it hides the categories from you which is I think the.

I have.

Well, I think it's just a matter of wording I like this presentation, better, and I like having the, the full tree expanded down the side here.

I like that better.

And perhaps not for a homepage.

I think this should be on the homepage.

It's obviously navigation.

And you're going to see it on all the pages, as long as the rest of the page is friendly and inviting. Yeah, exactly. This perhaps is not.

Well,

I, I changed it from quite as friendly and inviting

to this kind of a format and kept it friendly inviting for newcomers right.

But, you know, I can, I can, I can work on that I mean I can put it back to the way it was and then the information, the more functional utilitarian stuff can be coming out of the, the tree and the category pages.

Now the only the only thing and I'm going to have to go in a bit here, but the only other question I've got is, should the category page show up on all the pages.

You mean the tree category tree. This should be on every page.

Are you thinking of pages where it shouldn't be.

I guess your mind is made up where it shouldn't shouldn't be with that answer.

Well, I can't think of a place where I wouldn't want it.

Well I'm wondering like on an informational page. Yes, I take your point. Yeah.

I think it should be on all the category pages. Absolutely.

But I don't know that it should be on the informational pages. Yeah, I shouldn't be in the essays.

Yeah, yeah. And why not. I'm not married to my position I don't have a position I'm just curious.

I'm necessary to have that to have that level of detail. I mean you have a left now still have.

It's spectacularly incomplete.

Sure, but completeness of the whole site is not what a person would go to an essay page for. They're going to want to read the essay.

And then when they are thinking, what do I do next.

How do we support them.

There are categories at the bottom.

Yeah, there'll be categories at the bottom we're not going to be hiding them anymore.

Okay, so say for instance, I'm going to go to here.

I'm going to click on say this essay. Well that's not a well that's a good example I guess this is kind of a weird one because it's, I think it's got something to do with quantum mechanics and various description, it means more, more, more.

Let's go back to let's go back to one that I pretty sure as for Queens problem there.

So, it may not be as what we think of as an essay but for json essay it's got information, and you'd end up with the tree down this side.

I think that would be the tree is a distraction.

Everything is a distraction that isn't the essay, the left nav is a distraction and that's the left nav is a distraction but I think it's probably more, more necessary, but the adding another way is to me a bigger distraction, like another way.

Well you read right to left, you got a, you got one on your on your left now you got one on your right as well.

That's true and all the category pages and we accepted that as appropriate. I'm accepting that is inappropriate.

Because category pages are navigational. And if we upgrade to the current version of the wiki. The left nav is no longer the left nav it's a drop down menu. Yeah, you could do that too. Yeah, yeah.

That seems like a mistake.

I'm just a big fan of getting stuff in front of people but I, I'll admit to pushing that too far. On occasion.

Well that's how you were too far is.

Right. I guess what I would say is, we don't actually need to make the decision right now, we can try it out as far as we want to push it, and then see about other other approaches expanding it potentially.

Yeah, I will not push on that at this point. No, I think it has to be on the category pages.

But, but I don't know that it has to be on the, the terminal pages.

Anyway, a great discussion. Thank you for that was awesome. Oh yeah no it was fun. Thank you.

I'm going to stop share.

And, oh, hi Art. How you doing.

Mary I'll be there. Okay.

Anyway, without I guess I'll wrap things up.

And, yeah, and we'll. I think at this point I yeah I'm, I think I'm on for another meeting next week. And we'll go from there and I'll see what I can come up with with those ideas are great.

Cool. Take care everybody.

Be safe. Bye bye.