[plt-scheme] I want the old help desk back

On Sep  1, Paul Steckler wrote:
> 
> Mike T. Machenry wrote:
> >   I don't think it would be displeasing at all. In fact most every
> > search facility I've ever seen does this; Google included. You could
> > also have one front search page and require using the back button to
> > enter a new search. Some people may like that but it would definatly
> > get tiresome.

I think that the source of the problem is that the current setup of
the help desk tries to kill two birds with one stone -- being both a
manual and an on-line reference.  If it was only a reference, then you
would expect the result of a query for something to bring up just the
entry of that thing and then there wouldn't be a problem with a search
bar which is part of the page -- and maybe more features that are
usually found in such things like related links etc.  But the fact
that now you just get pointers into the manual which is in a printable
form (long pages, no repeated information on every entry) makes the
current setup look better than having to scroll 2 miles up to enter a
new search.


> Probably the reason Google does it that way is to accomodate 
> browsers that don't support frames.  Although Google's approach is
> usable, I think having frames does look better.

But that would be one way to cope with this with bad frame support.
Wouldn't it be easy to have a help-desk configuration page that will
allow you to customize such stuff (and colors, etc etc etc).


> But it's not the frames shown when searching that are giving 
> us fits -- it's the manual refresh stuff.  One way to get around 
> this would be to open a fresh browser to display the logging info.

I suppose that trying to fight this into a workable state would drive
you straight into the mental asylum of browser fighting...  If
help-desk uses MrEd already for the popup window, can't it just pop up
a window with such log info?  It even sounds more reasonable since the
work is done on the local machine rather than through the HTTP
connection (if you happen to get stuff done when you're not on the
same machine).  For cases where MrEd isn't working, then there's an
MzScheme server that can just dump stuff on its standard output....

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!