== Report of Meeting 2023-04-06 == Present: Ed Gottsman, Dave Lambert, Raul Miller, and Bob Therriault
Full transcripts of this meeting are now available on the its wiki page. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki/Report_of_Meeting_2023-04-06 1) We started off with Ed's fifth demo of the new J wiki browser. The challenge is to display a category tree of over 150 categories. Sub-categories are displayed with pages when possible, but when there are too many categories the display is broken into sub-pages. Also a timing constraint so that pages are only selected when they are hovered over for more than 1.5 seconds. Ed is beginning to think about what it would take to make a stand-alone version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhhGi8gLfvw 2) We talked for a bit about SQLite as a database. Ed was thinking about dropping it but has found it is very useful for debugging and fits the purpose well. Raul asked whether Jd had been considered. Ed said he could look at it, but would need to be convinced that it would be the right move. Bob thought that Jd would work and that there might be advantage as a showcase and the ability to write in J, but we should not let that get in the way of something that is working in SQLite. 3) Ed mentioned that he was picking up extra categories that are not part of the category tree in total over 750 categories and Ed wondered about including this many categories in the interface. Raul mentioned that it was really a tag cloud and Ed felt that might be a better way to display it, possibly with a threshold for display that might be user controlled. Ed suggested the tag cloud node could be another node in the category tree. 4) Bob showed some categorizations that he had done that tested the limits of categories, by making the category tree into a directed graph that has loops and loops within loops. This would have some functionality to develop trees that were related to a specific topic and these trees or portions of them could be attached to the category tree. It was generally decided that this would not be a good way to do this because loops can create user fatigue as they can create large, disorganized cognitive loops that confuse the user. We should be disciplined with the way we structure the wiki, but we can be more liberal with the way that we attach pages to the trees. 5) There was a discussion about a maintenance category in the wiki and whether that would be an issue with trying to tag pages with FixMe or Delete tags. Currently we are doing this to some extent by having a link on the main page to the wiki information. The link could also be put in the side bar so that it would be available on every page and this is probably a good direction to go with the Wiki W category on the main tree. 6) Ed explained that his wiki browser traverses the category breadth first search and if it sees the category a second time it will display it, but not its children. This makes the content on the category page important because it could contain links to child categories for users in addition to the structure of the tree. It also might just be series of links to the different user created categories that would 'air gap' the loops that could be created if they had been directly attached to the main category tree. User created category trees have their own categories and then link back to the pages freely. A node on the main category tree could be added for user defined category trees so that they can be found. 7) Bob mentioned a meeting that he had with Tom McGuire who has created many categories in the prototype wiki and he is working on the categorization of Essays and this is invaluable because it gives a second pair of eyes on the choices that had been made. It would also be a good idea to develop a list of categories so that we can guide people into more consistent categorization. 8) A discussion of adding a saved documents node in the table of contents so that you could curate pages that you found particularly useful. 9) A detailed discussion about tracking mouse movements. When the mouse moves off of the middle pane there is not a way to know the mouse has left an area and so the timer keeps running and the page will be displayed. Dave suggested that you might be able to track mouse position and Raul wondered if there is a focus loss event that could be tracked. Ed will do more investigation into this to see what events are being passed through the web view. 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 general 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 13th, 2023. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
