Posted by dorayme on 11/04/07 02:46

In article <Xns99DDB5B2C4F8Carbpenyahoocom@69.28.186.121>,
Adrienne Boswell <arbpen@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Gazing into my crystal ball I observed dorayme
> >>
> >> loop though the array until you reach breaknow then end the list and
> >> start another. If the total is not an even number, then the last
> list
> >> will have one extra item.
> >
> > Suppose there 400 items. Are you proposing a script that is alive
> > to the browsers window size or just to split lists into groups of
> > 10?
> >
>
> Personally, I would never put 400 items on a single page (even looping
> through an array, and certainly not an open recordset), that's what
> paging and good database design are about.

I have a web page of all the postcodes in Australia. The html
page has more than 17000 lines. I find it very convenient on one
page! For one thing, one does not even need a menu. Searching the
page is dead simple (command F and type first letters of town), I
love it for its artlessness <g>. Yes, an internal menu that was
fixed might also be nice to get to the different states but
anyway... I mention not as a pure aside. If you accept that
sometimes it is convenient to have a lot of stuff on a page,
there is the question of a fluid design that will get as much of
it as will fit on the screen and be convenient to read.

Correct me if I am wrong, your suggestion is to grab the items in
the list and divide them up into fixed-beforehand numbers of
items per ul. And float the ul's. Indeed, this would be fluid and
convenient if the lists were roughly the same length (the number
of items in a list cannot guarantee this, and I don't think
server side is good at semantics. I suppose there could be a
check on list size length built in and so on).

I was interested in this, Adrienne, because I did (but by hand) a
slightly similar thing for a page a while back which was broken
into blocks that floated and was not too bad in using up the
available space, there would be "wrapping" according to view port
width. I carefully arranged the floats based on length so they
would not snag in an ugly way when wrapped (by having the lists
go in size order, smallest first.

--
dorayme

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