On Dec 18, George Sanderson wrote:
> At 01:40 PM 12/18/00 -0800, you wrote:
> >you should take a look at the interface of the file management of
> >some of the free webspace providers.
>
> I have looked at some of these. They do not look and feel like a file
> manager. They tend to be fragmented and wordy.
a matter of taste, of course. it also depends on your target
audience. most of the free webspace providers are oriented towards
the lower-end of net-savviness, so things tend to be verbose. but
they also tend to have done actual usability testing, so i think
they're worth looking at to at least steal ideas from. :)
(as an example, i ran across one site that used javascript to pop up
a "uploading...please wait" window when you submitted a form to do
a file upload, and then put javascript on the page sent in response
to the upload to close that window. a very slick solution to the
problem that most browser don't provide any meaningful feedback
for http file uploads.)
> >i haven't really looked at the Apache::FileMan module, but the
> >biggest thing i would suggest is using something like the Template
> >Toolkit to move the html pages into templates.
>
> I am not there yet. FileMan does not require any client software and it is
> independent of the file content. It just doesn't care what is in a files
> or directory.
i didn't mean to suggest that, i meant you might want to move
towards getting rid of all the 'print "<html>blah blah blah"', in
your code and use something like Template Toolkit (or HTML::Template,
or any of the others).
http://www.template-toolkit.org/tpc4/paper.html#cgi (well, the
whole document, really) is a good place to read about what i'm
talking about.
(a browser-based html template editor, which is what i gather you
took me to mean, is also certainly possible. been there, done that,
wouldn't recommend it. :)
> >(personally, i've moved on to using dav (http://www.webdav.org/)
> >for most of my web-based file management needs.)
>
> I know very little about WebDAV. I looked at the site and found the DAV
> concepts interesting. Perhaps you could point me to a demo or more
> information about how the requirements are implemented. WebDAV appears to
> integrate the CASE information within the XML documents themselves.
well, webdav is an extension to http that allows you to "put",
"delete", "move", "copy", etc. the "webfolders" functionality bundled
with internet explorer on windows supports this. i've been hacking
together a very simple gtk-based file manager that supports it,
too (http://trainedmonkey.com/torem).
http://www.mydocsonline.com/ is an example of a service that provides
free space that is dav-accessible, if you just want to play around
with some of the clients and not spend time setting up your own dav
server.
jim
