Mouseover Descriptions, Subtopics

[+art begotti]

wow, been a while since i was last on here. i had an idea the other day that's probably stupid. but then again, i figured i might as well bother someone with it anyway. get it out of my system.

 

suggestion: you know how sometimes when you mouse over a link or picture, you sometimes get a small box of text to give a little bit of info? take for example the photos on the front page. at the top of the page, you can mouse over the photos, and get the name of the picture. sometimes it's "watching the evening sunset," sometimes it's "DSC_00159237".

 

my suggestion is to do the same thing with caches. when you mouse over a title of a cache, you get a small box to give a short description of that cache before you open the page. this could be entered in seperate by the cache planter, or just be the first umpteen-to-50 characters of the cache description. for example, when you mouse over a cache called "lazy river ride", you might get a box that says "an hour-long canoe trip over easy water". or you could post other information like "part of a series of 5" or "recommended night cache".

 

similarly, another idea is to have simple cache subtitles. while yes, this will clutter up the search-for-caches page even more, it serves the same purpose as the above in a probably-more-html-friendly manner. did you see the subtitle for this post? probably caught your eye when you came here, didn't it? for example, a cache listing might read as follows:

 

Lazy River Ride by joe shakalaka (GC0000)

Arkansas

"an hour-long canoe trip over easy water"

 

and.... well, that's my idea. so have fun picking it apart.

[+art begotti]

wow, nothing? okay... i suppose this thread will serve as a bUmp, but also to give a little clearer of an idea of what i mean.

 

what i'm trying to suggest -- you've already got it going.... for travel bugs.

yes, i know that when you use the printscreen button, the mouse disappears, but you can still see the box that popped up when i moused over a travel bug icon. my idea is to use that for cache descriptions; when you mouse over the name of a cache, a box pops up with a description.

 

if nothing else, respond to tell me if i used that semi-colon right. i've never been that sure about them buggers.

[+Langner91]

Not that it matters, but I like your suggestion.

[+Prime Suspect]

Well, none of the nearly 200,000 existing caches currently have this information. So its usefulness would be limited for quite a while. Also, hovering is a rather tedious way to find out information. It's fine, for example, to see what a particular icon means, because you only need to do it once. But for information that changes on every line, not so good.

[+caderoux]

Great idea to increase UI richness.

 

But implementation issues probably mean it won't be available here any time soon:

 

In a traditional page generation architecture (as gc.com currently uses) this would mean ALL that data (even 50 characters per cache adds up) shipped out to the browser. So the total page load gives an overall less-responsive system.

 

In an AJAX-style architecture (probably a long ways off for gc.com) where a user-dependent event triggers an asynchronous call to the server for additional information, the page load overhead goes away, but the delay before the tooltip to get the information increases. This can be done gradually in the background like Google Maps does to improve the responsiveness.

[Jeremy]

I've been gushing over how Netflix handles rollovers lately. It has me inspired.

[+CompuCash]

I've been gushing over how Netflix handles rollovers lately. It has me inspired.

 

pretty cool

looks like javascript - or CSS

 

CSS is more efficient

 

I do someroll overs at work to describe the parts and pieces of our equipment.

rollover the part and it pops up a small window like that with a short description.

 

do a google on javascript rollovers and you'll get a ton of them (both)

 

cc\

Edited August 20, 2005 by CompuCash