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Improved Filter

June 19, 2006

You can thank Zatko for this one. Since I only test this on my laptop so far, my mouse pad is directly accessible from my keyboard without much effort. So, on my laptop I am much quicker. You can refer to the post entitled "Hell" (use the filter, silly!) to see how much I hate how people go between their keyboard and mouse, when they can just use the keyboard all the time. So, generally, on a laptop, I don't have a problem with using the mouse moreso than on a desktop, since it's so close. And naturally, I totally forgot about keyboard accessibility when designing the filter.

So Zatko says "I would recommend using a form post instead of that link. i kept typing stuff and pushing enter and nothing was happening."

Touche. As this implies, great programmers think alike and hate using the mouse when they've already got two hands on the keyboard.

So, I've scripted up some script-y JavaScript. It now checks if you press enter on the form. Due to incredible programming ( ... in onkeypress, return false in a child control ... ), it will process the subfilter, where you search for News Categories on this site, and not process the filter, when pressing enter on a subfilter's text box. But, when you check an item in the result and press enter, it'll process the filter. It's quick and responsive like that.

However, I'm not sure it's 100% valid. I've noticed in the html reference for the FORM element, that s@#% doesn't have an "onkeypress" attribute. So, instead I used the good old fashioned "document.forms['formId'].onkeypress = funcKeypress;" method of doing it, instead of "<form onkeypress='(some javascript code)'>". Function pointers are always an excellent way of doing things. I searched for the second one, and the only sites I could find are *SHOCK* Microsoft web development sites like ASP and ASP.NET forums. I'm just not sure if Mozilla is allowing it in Quirks Mode or if it's an actual event on the form object. Who knows. It works, but that just doesn't seem good enough for me. Oh, and I have no idea if it works in any Microsoft related technology, since I've only tested it on my Linux and Mac computers... The gaming computer is the only Windows one up, and I'm not sure it's fit to be browsing in IE, and I don't install any software on it besides games :)

So, it's a lot simpler to use, thanks to me being down to 3/4ths of the number of computers I'm used to having, and the one being the one I spend most of my time browsing the internet on, and of course, to Zatko.

Comments
Jason Connell June 19, 2006 @ 3:54 PM Don't pollute your site with asp crap. Use ruby. It's like they sat down and thought, 'let's write a computer language'. And the one dude was like, 'well how do you want to design it?' and the other guy responds 'lets design it around awesomeness' And so it was. Ruby is the computer language embodiment of awesomeness.
Dr. Jones June 19, 2006 @ 4:17 PM Jason, You can polish a turd all you want, but it is still shit!
Jason June 19, 2006 @ 4:41 PM Pfff, whatever Zatko. :P And it's not asp. JSF is a pretty good framework. It's excellent, but the dependencies on JSP make it more difficult to use than it has to be.

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