Jack,
taking into account the need to control the width of the alphabet
list, my original suggestion of including a configurable list of valid
letters (to cover accented characters), might not hold water because
potentially you could have well over 26 letters depending on the
language.
The possibility of "degrading" special characters into their nearest
neighbor sounds like an interesting alternative, at least as far as an
ISO-8859-1 alphabet is concerned. However, I don't know how well it
would carry over to Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.
Maybe an array of special characters:
var ln_special_chars = {a: {'a', 'á', 'à'}, 'c': {'c', 'ç'}, 'e':
{'é', 'è', 'ë'}, ... n: {'n', 'ñ'}, ... etc}
Could be implemented to degrade/consolidate special characters as
suggested by sixtyseven and/or handle a non-iso-8859-1 alphabet in its
entirety.
Also, design-wise you may not always have sufficient space to show a
standard alphabet anyway, so maybe the possibility of controlling how
listnav wraps, for example allow the specification of wrapping on
characters 'h' & 'p', is something that should be planned for as well
just to cover all the bases.
Sincerely,
Christopher Vrooman.
On Jul 26, 2:13 pm, Jack Killpatrick wrote:
> Good idea making "All" a variable. You're the 2nd person in the last few
> days who had a need for that.
>
> And thanks for your thoughts on the special chars. As I mentioned in my
> other email a few minutes ago, I'll be adding support for that, I just
> need to think it through a bit more. It seems like it would be nice to
> have them automatically appear in the navigation, but that means losing
> control over how many things are in the nav, and therefore how wide it
> will be on the page (which could result in wrapping). One idea is to
> lump them into an "other" listnav item, but that doesn't seem very good,
> either. Another is to add a new row to the nav for dynamically adding
> nav links for special chars. Or the "other" could be a dropdown (but
> then it's items are out of view, which reduces the ability to quickly
> visually scan the list).
>
> Offhand, I don't know if there's an easy way (or whether it really makes
> sense logically to a user) to "degrade" chars to their nearest neighbor.
> I don't know enough about other languages to know.
>
> Thanks,
> Jack
>
> sixtyseven wrote:
> > I ran into a problem when having umlauts as first letter in the
> > tag. They will not be shown, until I add them to the letters array.
> > IMHO the better way would be to have a function, that "degrades" the
> > letter to the next near neighbor, i.e. if it is ü, make it to u, if
> > it's é make it to e, etc. Do you have any Idea how to achieve this?
> > Such a function would make the listnav more multilingual. While
> > speaking of this, perhaps you could make the word "All" a variable,
> > too.
>
> > Same thing with special chars like *,# etc. How about adding them into
> > a group of its own? Probably one could handle it like this: If the
> > first letter is neither a number nor a letter, it must be a special
> > char.
>
> > Hope I could explain the problem, my english is not that good.
>
> > Greetings from Germany
>
> > André
