Topic: Preview of topic in title in the links

One thing I'm missing in PunBB from other forum software, like vBulletin, is the first 2-300 letters of the first post in the title attribute in the links in topic listings. That way you get a nice tooltip when you're hovering the links.

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

Hmm, I think that should be easy to make as an extension for 1.3 smile

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

Smartys wrote:

Hmm, I think that should be easy to make as an extension for 1.3 smile

I hope so, cause it's not complicated. wink

But I think that it should be there by default, it's a nice touch in these days of web semantics and accessibility.

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

Hmm, I'm not sure how accessible it is.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html

W3C wrote:

12.1.4 Link titles

The title attribute may be set for both A and LINK to add information about the nature of a link. This information may be spoken by a user agent, rendered as a tool tip, cause a change in cursor image, etc.

Thus, we may augment a previous example by supplying a title for each link:

<BODY>
...some text...
<P>You'll find a lot more in <A href="chapter2.html"
       title="Go to chapter two">chapter two</A>.
<A href="./chapter2.html"
       title="Get chapter two.">chapter two</A>.
See also this <A href="../images/forest.gif"
       title="GIF image of enchanted forest">map of
the enchanted forest.</A>
</BODY>

I think if the first few words of a topic are spoken for every topic, you would annoy anyone using a screen reader tongue

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

I've never used a screen reader myself, but as far as I've understood they can skip to the next link without having to listen to the whole text/title.

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

Neither have I, but I would assume that even if they can skip, having to skip so many times would be annoying tongue
That's not to say it isn't a useful feature, I'm just not certain how "nice" it is in terms of accessibility.

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

Well, lets take an example! smile

You're scanning through the links in a topic listing, and there's "bad" topics. The author thought that "HELP!" was a good topic, cause that what he/she wants. So, instead of having to go to the page you can just continue listening. Then you'll find out that it's the same question that's been asked several times before, and that it's not worth it to go to the topic and answer GOOGLE IT/SEARCHFFS/whatever. Both seeing and non-seeing (and everyone inbetween) saves some time. smile

8

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

Don't assume screen readers work in a particularl way and more importantly don't assume accessibility is only about blind people.  All in all title attributes would seem to be at best a waste of space and at worst positively harmful. I also tend to think tooltips are ugly but thats just a personal preference.

For more information
http://www.rnib.org.uk/wacblog/articles … ttributes/

If anything, I would rather put this type of functionality in a span within the link which means you could control its display with css. Either that or a javascript expander which would actually show/hide the information in the table cell as normal text. However, all in all I don't like the idea. If I were using vbulletin I think its something I would want to disable.

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

I defer to Paul on all matters accessibility related wink

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

intedinmamma wrote:

The author thought that "HELP!" was a good topic, cause that what he/she wants. So, instead of having to go to the page you can just continue listening.

I just ignore such topics.

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

I guess I'll have to dig into the extension system then. wink

12 (edited by Pihtt 2007-11-20 11:36)

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

I'm trying to get a topic list from a specific forum with poster, date, message, etc.
I know I could make it easily with two SQL requests but I know it's possible with an unique request.
I've tried this :

SELECT t.id, t.poster, t.subject, t.posted, t.num_replies, p.message FROM pun_topics AS t INNER JOIN pun_posts AS p ON p.topic_id=t.id WHERE forum_id=8 ORDER BY t.posted DESC LIMIT 3

Obviously, I get all the post in the specific forum but not all the first post of each topic.

This request misses something, but I don't understand what...
Please...

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

Well, you're joining all of the posts for a given topic, not just the first post. I think you would be better off waiting until 1.3, where we've added the column first_post_id, which should improve these types of joins.

14

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

That would be a pity to use two requests.

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

I'm not exactly sure how using two requests versus one would differ. In my mind, the join you would do would be very similar.

16 (edited by Pihtt 2007-11-20 12:24)

Re: Preview of topic in title in the links

Ok, thank you Smartys...

Tubby made a mod with the solution : http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=15607
Thank you Tubby

Here is the correct request :

SELECT t.id, t.poster, t.subject, t.num_replies, t.forum_id, p.topic_id, p.message, p.posted
FROM pun_topics AS t
INNER JOIN pun_posts AS p ON t.id = p.topic_id
AND p.posted = t.posted
WHERE t.forum_id =8
ORDER BY t.posted DESC
LIMIT 3

It missed an other join: AND p.posted = t.posted
GREAT!
Hope it'll help...