Oolite Bulletins

mcarans wrote:

If the OXP List even with length restrictions gets too big for a single web page, an easy change would be to put the Ships OXPs into their own table. The fact that I'm even considering this possibility is testament to the work of all OXP authors in producing so many high quality OXPs.

The problem is with OXPs that are multi-category. For example Aquatics is primarily a ship OXP, but has equipment, mission and dockable aspects to it. Taking the ship OXPs out into their own table would either lead to a duplication of an OXP in multiple tables, or one of the tables being arguably incomplete.

I recall this discussion came up when we last had the wiki sort-out, and why we still ended up with the single table, but improved by being sortable etc.

I don't think that's what mcarans meant. I'm sure he was talking about just-ship OXPs, not OXPs that add ships and other stuff.
Separating out the just-ships may be needed at a future date.

Yeah, there's no easy solution. I do wonder how many people install a 'multi' just because they want one of the ships though. I'm sure it has happened, but not too often I'd expect. Most of the really cool ships have their own stand-alone OXP.
There is already a warning on the page that is is 'too long' (if you go into 'edit'), so this is something we'll need to address soon.

Smivs wrote:

There is already a warning on the page that is is 'too long' (if you go into 'edit'), so this is something we'll need to address soon.

Not too soon. This warning has been there forever, and is probably aimed at browser versions which don't even exist anymore.

It was the reason for splitting the table into separate tables for different letters in the first place, though. Which was reverted by the sortable table.

I'm not suggesting we actually do anything about it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I think that the new Javascript engines in IE9, Chrome, Safari and Firefox are so fast now that the list will probably handle a fair few more OXPs before it runs into trouble. The Work in Progress OXPs and OXPs with Problems could be moved to another page at that time, so I guess any list splitting is way off for now, so we can discuss it once it becomes a necessity.

How about a category for OXP's that fit multiple categories that is linked from all the other categories? OK, that sounds recursive. I'm speaking of a category for multiple category OXP's. That category would be a link at the bottom of all the other category pages. This way, nothing is left out, but nothing gets listed two, three, or six times? Is this a viable alternative?

Gnudoll wrote:

How about a category for OXP's that fit multiple categories that is linked from all the other categories? OK, that sounds recursive. I'm speaking of a category for multiple category OXP's. That category would be a link at the bottom of all the other category pages. This way, nothing is left out, but nothing gets listed two, three, or six times? Is this a viable alternative?

Let's think more about this when we need to... so far our browsers still seem to cope with the onslaught of OXP authors...