Re: [Bug-gnubg] HTML export

[Gary Wong]

On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 02:05:06PM +0000, Joern Thyssen wrote:
> For some technical reasons it's probably only possible to export in
> sizes (approx) 432x288, 864x576, 1296x864 etc, so we probably need
> another slideruler for this.

Oops... that's my fault... with a bit of work, we could probably get
all multiples of 108x72 going.

I have been playing around with Mozilla plugins, and gotten to the
point where:

    <object width=432 height=288 type="application/x-backgammon-board">
    <param name="positionid" value="4HPwATDgc/ABMA" />
    ...standard table of images for display in browsers without the
    plugin goes here...
    </object>

will display a board in the starting position.  The advantage is that
the renderer in the plugin needs to generate only one set of the basic
images which are then shared among all boards on the page (as long as they
are all the same size), which saves lots of time, memory and network
traffic on a big page.  The user can also control the appearance (in
theory -- not yet implemented).  I'm not sure how easily the page could
be set up so the user could also control the board size, but that's
probably possible somehow for our 1600x1200 friend.  The plugin could
also do other things like open gnubg at the displayed position for
deeper analysis.

(Of course, using a plugin raises all the usual portability headaches,
but the object specification is simple enough that alternative
implementations shouldn't be too difficult, and browsers without the
plugin should transparently fall back to the current table-of-images,
so we're no worse off than where we are at the moment.)

>     (in general, frames suck, but they may be have a usual purpose here)

Argh, please not frames, anything but frames!  They break printing,
search engines, the "back" button, URL location addressability,
bookmarks, "view source", and who knows what else...

If we want a "move at a time" view as well as the current "game at a time"
view, then a much better way to do it would be to just generate one HTML
file for each move, and each one could contain a table with whatever
gimmicks we want on the page (board, move list, navigation tools,
whatever).

Cheers,
Gary.
-- 
   Gary Wong           address@hidden           http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~gary/