[Building Sakai] [Using Sakai] Sakai 10: options link renders differently in different browsers

[Mark Reilly]

+1 for removing all the iframes.

I'd like to see consistency across the tool (header) navigation and sub navigation — consistency visually and in the markup. 

I think we'll need to come up a design pattern and apply it to all the tools. 

The lesson tool for example suppress the portal tool head and then uses a different design pattern. it's adds a Table of Contents link. It also uses dropdowns in the subnavigation.  

I am all for this innovation but we need to build tools that give a consistent experience for the user.

I know there are some technical issues with the different templating methods (RSF, Wicket, Velocity etc) but that's not a good enough reason to use very different markup. 

It's bad user experience and poor developer experience too.

Part of what I am doing with Morpheus is creating a design pattern library — a mini 'bootstrap. But it'll need to be applied to all the tools for it to be useful. For our 2.8 (NYU) sass based skin I had to use 3 or 4 variations of the subnavigation styles to create a consistent look because the markup across tools was so varied.

Thanks,
Mark Reilly       



> I should add that if we added this to infrastructure - there would still be small tool changes across the board to take advantage of the pencil icon.
> 
> Also with Morpheus - we might find all of this needs revisiting.  Maybe it all ends up nicely under a super awesome hamburger icon!
> 
> /Chuck
> 
> On Jul 17, 2014, at 11:29 AM, Charles Severance <csev at umich.edu> wrote:
> 
>> What steve proposes is doable as long as the tool has a known GET url that gets to its configuration page.   It would be a small bit of data in a tool registration somewhere.
>> 
>> It would be easy for the portal to render that GET link under a pencil icon in the title bar.
>> 
>> Rewriting things as portlets is a wonderful idea one I have had since 2007 - but alas no resources :)
>> 
>> We will just get rid of iframes in infrastructure for Sakai-11 :)
>> 
>> /Chuck
>> 
>> On Jul 17, 2014, at 7:41 AM, Steve Swinsburg <steve.swinsburg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> It's infrastructural. The portal renders the various icons on behalf of the portlet, meaning its outside of the normal frame that the tool gets access to. The reason the other tools all look the same is because they all output the same bit of HTML at the top. But they could just as easily look completely different.
>>> 
>>> If we want the links to be outside of the tool frame then we would need some way for a tool to register their set of links (as portlets do now in the portlet.xml) - the portal can then pick that up and render the links. That would introduce significant issues in the way tools navigate themselves around between pages though.
>>> 
>>> Maybe we should just redo all tools as portlets!
>>> 
>>> cheers,
>>> Steve
>>> 
>> 
> 
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