Re: Things to think about

[Lee Willis <lee leewillis co uk>]

On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 05:34, Kevin Godby wrote:

> a.  I think all the results (regardless of which backend they came from)
> should be sorted by relevance and displayed with the highest relevant
> items at the top of the list.  (This means we'd need to disaggregate the
> results -- no longer keeping them grouped back backend.)

I'd agree - however I don't think the relevance would necessarily be the
value that the frontend sent. Dashboard should be able to
ingore/increase/decrease this based on data it finds at the backend.

> b.  I think we need to find a widget that is capable of dynamically
> sorting the results as they are generated by Dashboard.  (I propose that
> we look at various listview widgets over the html widgets.)

Yeah - I don't think HTML will really do the job - even if we move to
mozembed.

> Presently, Dashboard displays the results in the order it receives them
> from the backends.  Subsequently, slower backends will have their
> results displayed further down the list even though their results may be
> more relevant.  The HTML widgets (such as gtkhtml-sharp and Mozilla) do
> not allow dynamic insertions of results.

Also, if we consider that dashboard can amend relevance then it may be
that the relevance value of a resultset from a quick-returning backend
is modified after display time, and would then need re-displaying at its
new position, based on the findings of a slower backend[1]

I think real user feedback, based on real user data will really shape
how we make dashboard work, at both the frontend, and the backend[2]

Lee
[1] Yes, the architecture couldn't do this right now, but ...
[2] The more I think about it, the more I think that making backends
stateless won't help us later down the line, when they need to know
about previous results they returned, and results returned by other
backends etc.
-- 
Lee Willis <lee leewillis co uk>