Structured Data Sort
One of the most important tasks you do as a web designer is give order to information, more importantly an order that the person using the site either expects or can intuitively run with. Sometimes this means separating that information out into pages, sometimes that means writing client or server-side scripts to provide more choice, and sometimes it means making judgements about which documents, or information are likely to be most important to the user.
What I have been working on, and am still working on, is finding better ways of giving the user more control over the information they are given, quickly and easily. I envisage this to include blog posts, document collections, site navigation, and pretty much anything else really.
So what have I actually been doing?
Over the past view months I’ve spend a lot of time looking into methods of relating data together, I explained the basics of one of these earlier this week - document, or term vector comparison.
The first server-side script I have written uses this method to allow sorting based on keyword relevance within a list, table, or definition list.
This script takes any number of these lists on a page and adds the option to each entry to sort the list based on other entries within it. It degrades nicely, i.e. if there is no Javascript it will not run and doesn’t restrict CSS styling.
So where is it?
You can see the example and the instructions here: Structured Data Sort.
Steve Tucker comments:
This is very impressive, Andy. I can imagine it being tremendously useful when very large quantities of structured data are involved.
I haven’t yet had chance to take any more than a brief glance under the bonnet, but I’ll definitely be having a good look through soon enough.
Well done!
8th January 2007 , 09:42
Bob Johnson comments:
I too have been looking at how to order data, In fact I am working with a very talented team of designers to make a central content server to bring order to chaos - as if that’s really possible :-)
Good luck on the project!
8th January 2007 , 09:46