Comments Archive

See also current Comments. Please move comments here when the conversation seems resolved.


I've installed a stylesheet that James has contributed. I think it still needs a few tweaks, but what do other people think of it? --Dom

  • I don't like the box around the front page, or the rendering of the HR's in Mozilla. -- James
  • I've fixed the HRs (made them smaller) but I don't see what the different between the box on the home page is. Okay, I have just added a navbar to the home page, is that better? -- Dom
  • Yes that looks nicer although I feel the html needs tweaking still. The content DIV's also appear to be identical in scope to the body of each page which feels redundant to me. Possibly there should be different div's to wrap around the content and metadata. I could e-mail you an example of my ideas if it's of any help. -- James

HTML fixes: I've made an & -> &amp; change to fix a validation bug in the main node display (in the link to the backlinks page); the other main bug is that line breaks end up being delimited by <p> tags, which is invalid. This probably needs some special logic in Text::WikiFormat (maybe? haven't delved into the code enough yet). --Dom


James: Can the pages please be validatable HTML of some form or another? I'm trying to write a suitable stylesheet and it would make life a little easier, it's just a few loose </P> tags I believe. Should the <div id="... be <div class="... ?

  • I think the problem is that <hr /> and <<form> ... </form> aren't valid inside paragraph tags, you can spot this on most of the pages as far as I can tell. I could be wrong, but I think that's it. Thanks for the info about the id attribute, that cleared things up for me. -- James

I've changed the navbar to be horizontally laid-out. Is this better or worse? --Dom

  • Better although a little padding between the navigation links and the search box would look a little nice, it seems a bit cramped up there. Perhaps better in the long term would be to define the navbar as something like

<div id="navbar">
<div class="navtool"><a href="http://www.ox.compsoc.net/oxfordguide/">Home</a></div> ...
<div class="navtool"> ... </div>
</div>
which should give the designer of a style sheet more flexibility over the layout. --James

  • I've done what you suggested except that <span> is appropriate here, not <div>. I've left the pipe symbols in as separators for the time being; if someone can suggest a better way of doing this so that it'll fall back to something readable without css, let me know. --Dom

James: Is it nessecary to provide both a map link and the OS co-ordinates? In the current situation if streetmap etc. make a slight change to the formatting of their URL this means that every entry needs to be manually corrected, whereas if we generated the map URL from the coordinates (streetmap provide instructions at http://www.streetmap.co.uk/linkto.htm) only a single change would be needed to the code.

  • The problem is that Streetmap have been known to be arsey in the past about software that automatically generates links to them. However, it was slightly more complicated in this particular case because the software itself was doing lookups to streetmap. The fun starts on the london.pm mailing list. Personally I'd be happy with doing a simple conversion as documented on their own site (I didn't notice that page before) but if Kake isn't happy with it this'll require me or someone else to maintain a patch to OpenGuides and this will need some time spent to familiarise myself with the codebase. --Dom
  • I'm not sure how using their advertised method to generate the URL is any different (from streetmap's point of view) than having manually generated URLS linked to them. IMHO, it should be okay. The london.pm case appears to be slightly different as they were actively accessing streetmap systems to generate the information. James
  • I've now added this to the Oxford installation. If a map link has been supplied, this will be linked; if not, and complete location data has been supplied, one will automatically be generated using the specification mentioned above. Patch submitted to Kake for inclusion; also available as OpenGuides-automaplink.patch temporarily. --Dom

James, I think the KA node might want reviewing in the cold light of sobriety :) --Dom

  • My review was too kind? Or were you pointing out my atrou... bad spelling? :o) -- James
  • It had some somewhat dodgy bracketing, mainly --Dom

PhilH: this is an interesting project, i'm afraid i'm not familiar with Wiki sorry in advance for any cockups i may make ;)

  • Welcome. I'd heartily recommend that you read House Style; it'll make your contributions much more valuable. --Dom

Dom: I can't decide how streets should work, exactly. I think that all streets should be created as Locale links in text, along the lines of ((Locale Foo Street | Foo Street)) (those should be square brackets, but the nowiki tag doesn't seem to work). Then if the locales are important they will be clicked on/otherwise created, and used, if not, no harm done. Perhaps we should even have a macro for this. The idea is that you can easily get a list of all things in a specific street. I'm not entirely convinced by all this, though.

James: I think this would probably improve things, it would make it a lot easier for people to properly link their entries. Otherwise having streets as entries forces the author to actually go and edit the entry for a street to link the entry in properly. Just my 2p.

Kake: Making people explicitly write ((Locale Foo Street|Foo Street)) is a pain though, especially when you can just make Foo Street be a redirect to Locale Foo Street (ie, you only have to do it once).

Dom: Ah, yes, I like this idea even more.


James: Are inline images disabled or is this a bug?

  • Use img tags — it's done like this so you can put ALT and TITLE text in. --Kake
  • However, I am fairly strongly against linking large photos inline. They disrupt the use of the site. If they *must* be included, then they should at least have width and height tags. --Dom
  • Yeah, can we cut down on the images? I like small, fast-loading pages. Stick in links to images by all means, though. --Kake

Kake: I'd encourage contributors to make themselves a page so people can see who else is using this, for example Kake, Dom, James, Art. We've found on grubstreet that it makes the guide feel like more of a community thing.


James: Would it be possible to alter the long/lat display from the decimal representation to the more usual degrees and minutes representation? Streetmap appears to use this representation.

  • This is a preferences option in OpenGuides 0.16, which I hope to release today. Thanks for the suggestion. --Kake
  • 0.16 has now been installed.

Namespace advice wanted! I'd like to review the monthly Farmer's Market in Gloucester Green and the weekly one in Wolvercote. It also seems sensible to add links for the other markets that happen in GG - weekly food market and antiques&collectables. Anyone got any sensible nodenames for this lot? One gloucester_green_markets node with 3 sections, or ideas like gloucester_green_fruit_and_veg_market, or what? -- Socks

Separate nodes, I think. gloucester_green_fruit_and_veg_market would be fine, as would fruit_and_veg_market_(gloucester_green). -- Dom


If a pub in Stanton Harcout is allowed, can I write an article for the Roman Villa in East End? - James

I wouldn't object. It's not like Stanton Harcourt is ever going to have an Open Guide of its own, I suspect. -- Dom


An RSS feed of the "recent edits" page would be handy, to allow people to track changes to the Guide through their RSS reader of choice. - PerfDave

It's been around for ages. I'm sure it used to be linked from the recentchanges page but maybe it got lost after a template change.

http://www.ox.compsoc.net/oxfordguide/?action=rss --Dom


The whole Coffee Shops, Café is bugging me now. I can't think of a Café that doesn't serve coffee nor of a Coffee Shop that doesn't serve some form of food. It appears that if something belongs in one category it just as easily belongs in the other. I think it makes it confusing to navigate through the categories and actually see every node of interest. -- James

For me, a Coffee Shop is somewhere I'd go for coffee (though I may have food with it), and a Cafe is somewhere I'd go for food (though I may have coffee with it) or a sit in the sun with a book. --Kake


Last edited 2005-11-23 19:19:19 (version 6; diff). List all versions.