Sidebar and Webpanels, thoughts
By glazou on Friday 5 November 2004, 13:44 - Mozilla - Permalink
I think we need a better sidebar/webpanel mechanism. I am going to illustrate this opinion with two cases:
- launch firefox, show your bookmarks in the sidebar for instance typing ctrl-b and click on a bookmark to download it. Hide the webpanel typing again ctrl-b. Oh, well, that's not what you wanted to do, so you type ctrl-b a third time. The selection of your bookmark is gone because the document in the sidebar/webpanel was reloaded...
- launch Nvu, and open the Site Manager typing F9. Navigate in your site, and close the Site Manager to reopen it immediately. All your navigation is forgotten...
That's most certainly caused by the way the sidebar is displayed, through a <browser> element. I think it's time for a better option preserving your navigation history/selection/scroll in the sidebar. In the case of Nvu and its Site Manager, that's mandatory, I hear too many people complain about that.
Comments
You make a very good point, Daniel. However, what if you load a different sidebar and then switch back to, say, the bookmark manager? I'd say it should still have its old state restored.
On the other hand, sidebars like Gemal's blogupdates *should* be reloaded when re-opened...
jens.b: good point, so we need something new allowing both static and always-reloaded panels.
I think Nvu should have a sidebar tab for selecting a CSS style. It would make applying CSS styles to HTML documents a lot easier.
Yeah, this problem bit me as well when I was developing a sidebar extension for Firefox. My solution was to put all of the state of my extension in a XPCOM object. Then when the sidebar is reloaded, I just rebuilt the page from the state stored in the XPCOM object. Not great, but it mostly works.
My prefered editor with regard to panels is IDEA. They have a concept of panels that you can open. simultaneously or not. These panels can appear on the left, bottom or right. They can be configured to stick or not. When they do not stick pressint Esc will make them disappear from the view, giving you back screen space. Alt+1 Alt+2 etc.. are to open the panels 1,2,...
See screenshots at:
www.jetbrains.com/idea/fe...
If you have time, look at all the other features. This editor changed my coding life because of its usability.
There's a free text editor I've used on Windows for something like seven years now, and its UI resembles what you'd like to see.
A file-managing panel appears on F6, and the focus is automatically on the current file's name.
And you're right: it's a very nice feature to use. Once you use it on a daily basis you begin to wonder why no more UIs have integrated the trick.
I don't know XUL but can't your browser object get the document's URL and from there deduct what to highlight?
(I forgot to name the editor, silly me: Notetab, see www.notetab.com/ for details)