Can anyone make sense of this?

dave conz · 11-02-2003, 12:17 AM

I've had a user in one of our forums make a technical suggestion about the site. I've been scripting in Perl for a few years now and I've extensively modified this particular forum, however I have no idea what he's talking about. Here's what he said:

Quote:

Dave,
I was just thinking its a shame having to refresh the screen for sometimes tiny messages.
Do you think using a hidden frame would do the trick and only refresh for threads? 100 bytes verses 15K and also quicker.

I replied that I didn't really get what he wanted and he said:

Quote:

The hidden frame would be exactly that (0% cols or rows) so it is the one refreshed and as it has almost finished loading it sends the message to say a textarea object and hidden field object on the main page with the reply info. All that basically comes into a hidden frame array is the raw data which of course is a fraction the memory size of the page and is then dumped into a form object to be seen which eliminates the actual page reloading.
There may be a chance the back button may not work.
However I think probably the biggest nuiscance would be differences between Netscape and IE.

You can see the messages in context here.

Does this make sense to anyone here? If so, can you please tell me what the hell he means? Thanks.

samer · 11-02-2003, 05:06 AM

:-S ==> Confused

**LazyJim** · 11-02-2003, 05:09 AM

It's a trick to load data from other places into the page.
You put an <iframe> in your page somewhere and set it's hight and width to 0 - so no-one sees it.
Then in you JavaScript and <a href="..." target="the_iframe"> you set the src property of the iframe and it loads a the url without anyone noticing. If the file you tell it to load holds the data you want you can dynamically insert the data into the current visible page.

**LazyJim** · 11-02-2003, 05:10 AM

There's probably tutorials somewhre in CodeMonkey

Or ask me for more.

dave conz · 11-02-2003, 02:01 PM

Thanks for that. If I understand correctly, he wants me to use a form object to display each message instead of having a whole new page. As I see it this would mean relying on JavaScript which is not a good thing IMO. In any case I'm not about to embark on such a fundamental re-write of the forum script.

Thanks again for clarifying the situation. At least I think it's clear

**LazyJim** · 11-02-2003, 02:03 PM

lol I agree JavaScript should not be made essential, it's power should only be used to enhance something that still works without it.