On 6 Mar, Simon Smith wrote in message
<9527682853.zen44...@zen.co.uk>:
> One longstanding UI gripe I have with NetSurf (in fact, I think it's about
> my only serious remaining gripe) arises whenever a link has an overlong
> URL. The first part of the URL appears to the left of the bottom scroll
> bar. But if the URL is obnoxiously long, as often happens, the right part
> is truncated and AFAICS there is no way to access it. I /really/ hate not
> knowing where is a link is going to take me, or not being able to tell the
> filetype of something without starting to download it.
>
> A fix which would mitigate matters is if the proportion of the lower
> scroll bar (or, even better, the absolute size in pixels) allocated to the
> horizontal scroll was configurable and/or persistent from window to
> window. I am getting quite tired of shrinking the h-scroll and then
> following a link, only for the new link to come up in a new window with
> the old 50% horizontal-scroll bar width! I do wish it would at least
> follow the size setting of the window it was opened from, particularly as
> I find it fiddly to select the tiny 'hotspot area' of the h-scroll bar
> width slider.
We could right-justify the status bar text if it overflowed the available
space (as RISC OS titlebars do).
Alternatively, would cutting a chunk out of the middle of the text be any
better (in addition to possible other options)?
The front-end doesn't seem to know anything about the status bar content
(beyond that it's some text), so it might be pretty stupid. Intelligence
such as "Send form to http://foo.com/...bar/wibble.php"; would probably
require some very educated guesswork, I suspect (unless there's a way to
negotiate the length of the text with the core?).
> I appreciate that some URLs are impossibly long, and only a multi-line URL
> display would ever be able to fully display them, but in the meantime
> there are several ways you could mitigate the problem. (e.g. a key
> shortcut that toggles full-length (or at least a longer) URL display, a
> hovering link display tooltip, using the !Help application to display the
> link, etc.) Personally I would be happy to have the URL given a whole line
> of its own, even though that would sacrifice some vertical screen space,
> because I feel this info is important enough to justify such a usage. And
> a full line would usually be sufficient space, whereas on my setup half a
> line often isn't.
I see there's actually some tooltip code buried in the local history GUI for
the RISC OS front-end (turn them on via the option in Interface). Can a
front-end find out from the core that the pointer is hovering over a link,
form submission button or similar?
--
Steve Fryatt - Leeds, England Wakefield Acorn & RISC OS Show
Saturday 20 April 2013
http://www.stevefryatt.org.uk/ http://www.wakefieldshow.org.uk/
