My idea was to introduce something like context help in phpMyAdmin. I'd also add those ? icons to the interface, but instead of
jumping to an
anchor in the documentation I'd prefer to display a short
(maybe even
localized) text in a JS window that tells the user more a
bout a specific interface
element. I'd also offer this context help for popular error messages
i.e. if the
MySQL server refuses the username / password.
I definitely support this idea of context help, using the /lang files.
well i would use javascript if possible as well, but do you mean just using an alert()? i'd rather open a new window each time the user clicks on the ? instead of sending all the strings with the page when he opens it so i can just display them as a message. because otherwise we'd really have to write _very_ short helptext or we would be sending a lot of helptext data which only few users will ever see.
which is also why i wouldn't put them in the normal lang files - these get included on every page, so with every page we'd be putting every available shorthelp for all pages ....
Beck, Mike wrote:
My idea was to introduce something like context help in phpMyAdmin. I'd also add those ? icons to the interface, but instead of
jumping to an
anchor in the documentation I'd prefer to display a short
(maybe even
localized) text in a JS window that tells the user more a
bout a specific interface
element. I'd also offer this context help for popular error messages
i.e. if the
MySQL server refuses the username / password.
I definitely support this idea of context help, using the /lang files.
well i would use javascript if possible as well, but do you mean just using an alert()? i'd rather open a new window each time the user clicks on the ? instead of sending all the strings with the page when he opens it so i can just display them as a message. because otherwise we'd really have to write _very_ short helptext or we would be sending a lot of helptext data which only few users will ever see.
which is also why i wouldn't put them in the normal lang files - these get included on every page, so with every page we'd be putting every available shorthelp for all pages ....
We are already including the whole lang file on every page, even if the messages won't be used, and PHP seems happy with this :)
We are not sending the whole lang file to the browser.
well i would use javascript if possible as well, but do you mean just using an alert()?
No, I don't like alert() windows for help texts because they are only useful for small strings. Furthermore you may disable specific alert messages if you are using Opera 6. This "feature" would be very annoing for our purposes ;-)
i'd rather open a new window each time the user clicks on the ? instead of sending all the strings with the page when he opens it so i can just display them as a message.
That's the way to go. I meant a small window, maybe 300x100 pixels, without menu bar etc. that only displays the help text.
which is also why i wouldn't put them in the normal lang files - these get included on every page, so with every page we'd be putting every available shorthelp for all pages ....
We would only need the help texts in this small JS window. Your idea would be to introduce seperate language files only for these help texts, right? I don't like this idea very much, let's see how it works if we do use the normal language files. If it makes PMA too slow, we'd split the language files up.
Alexander
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Alexander Turek -
Beck, Mike -
Marc Delisle