rankle

rankle is a proof-of-concept ranking/ordering widget i'm playing with. it's not fully functional right now, but i'm beginning to get a feel for how the javascript manipulation works in dom1. i'm sure i could be doing better.

you can switch between plain and fancy views. it starts off by default with the plain view, which is how you'd expect a non-javascript browser to see it. If you don't see a way to switch views, you probably have javascript turned off.

you should be able to submit forms with this kind of widget under either view.

in fancy view, click on an item or the arrows next to the item to promote or demote it. arrows with a horizontal bar over or under them go all the way to the top or bottom, respectively.

this still doesn't handle some things that it will need to handle before it's complete:

• i'd like to make a simple php class that can generate the html for a rankle widget given some simple parameters (title, variable prefix, array of items with some initial pre-rankings). The same class could also process the returned input variables and clean them up.

Some things i'm probably not going to fix:

• if you enter non-contiguous choices (e.g. only 1 and 4 without 2 or 3) in the plain view, and then switch to the fancy view, it makes your choices contiguous (e.g. it would make those entries ranked 1 and 2). i'm not too worried about that because the purpose of this widget is ranking, not scoring. In fancy view, there would be no way to indicate such a disparity anyway.

i'd like any feedback people have to offer, especially testing it out on a variety of different browsers.

here's some info about browser compatibility (i welcome additional reports if you got 'em):

browsers which work

on mozilla 2:1.7.3-5 and firefox 0.9.3-5, rankle functions as i expect it to. of course, i developed it on this platform, so that's not surprising.

dillo 0.8.1-1, lynx 2.8.5-1, and elinks 0.9.1+0.9.2pre4-1 all work fine, because they ignore javascript and css and just render the plain mode.

konqueror 4:3.2.2-1 renders almost everything fine, though it has some problems displaying the correct list numbers when things are moved around in the ordered list. This build of konqueror also doesn't seem to be able to handle the up- and down-arrow characters (⇑ and ⇓).

links2 2.1pre15-3 tries to handle the javascript, but doesn't do anything with it. this is OK because it still leaves the form intact in plain mode.

browsers which don't work

mozilla 1.0.0 (in debian woody) doesn't seem to propagate the values of the form widgets from one view to the other.

the latest IE 6.0 as of Sun Oct 10 13:58:15 EDT 2004 on windows 2000 gives a javascript error of this should have been of class rankle! but it was class null.

i got a report from enw that safari version 1.2.3 doesn't show anything in the 'fancy view'.

enw also reports that Opera 6.03 (the one that crashes when you select "About Opera") generates a JavaScript alert of this should have been of class rankle! but it was class undefined.

enw also sez that IE for the mac (don't know what version) doesn't let him switch views.

browsers i haven't tested but would like to know about

• Internet Explorer versions 5, 5Mac, 5.5, and 6
• OmniWeb (versions?)
• older versions of the gecko browsers?
• ???