I just added the following to the "News" section on DFI today, but thought I'd also go ahead and post it here, too, in the hope of generating more feedback:
Feb 13, 2005: Calling all freeneters! Your feedback is needed! I'm currently in the process of doing some fairly extensive revisions to the spider used to generate both DFI's database of site links as well as the actual HTML code for the site itself. Perhaps the biggest and most important idea under consideration (which I'm leaning rather strongly in favor of, myself) is the addition of support for activelink images. I'd like to know how you would feel about such a change, and I'll explain my own views on the matter right here, right now. The payoff, it seems to me, would be quite substantial, and the drawbacks, if any, quite minimal in comparison. For a trivial amount of additional code in the spider itself, and in the HTML code for DFI, we would be reaping some fairly significant benefits. Not only would the images lend a great deal more visual appeal to DFI (something it is sorely lacking in at present), but more importantly, they would also assist in the propagation of each site's metadata (which is what activelinks were originally designed to do, by the way, in case you didn't already know), thus helping to improve "the freenet experience" for everyone. Your node would be fetching and saving sites' metadata in your local datastore for future reference, while also improving its routing capabilities in the process, a big win for everybody no matter how you look at it. The only real drawbacks, as far as I can see, would be a slight increase in the size of the HTML code (pretty much a moot issue, as DFI's index.html is compressed and stored in a zipped container file anyway) and longer time for the entire index page to render completely (due to the fact that your browser would actually be fetching the images in realtime each time you load DFI). Bear in mind that we're only talking about adding a line or two of HTML code that references an image, not embedding the actual image itself in the page, so it's not like we'd be adding a whole lot of additional data per site. Also, the presence or absence of a given site's image would serve as a pretty good realtime indicator of the likelihood of it being successfully retrieved (a concept you're no doubt already familiar with from using The Freedom Engine). In addition, you would still be able to browse through the index, reading sites' info, right-clicking on links to open them in a separate tab or window, etc., while any remaining images were still being fetched, so the overall usability of the index would not be impaired in any way by this. The main body of the index would still be rendered as quickly as possible by your browser, while the activelink images would be fetched and rendered asynchronously. Your thoughts on this idea would be greatly appreciated. Please use the feedback link on the DFI navigator to send me your opinion. Thank you! -- dolphin _______________________________________________ chat mailing list chat@freenetproject.org Archived: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.freenet.general Unsubscribe at http://dodo.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/chat Or mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
