[Epiphany] Re: Default layout discussion

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

Daniel Borgmann writes: 


> I agree with that.
> The thing that irritates me is the default layout of the location entry.
> Or rather the size of it. The two reasons which were brought up in favor
> of it were "user can see more of the URL" and "we can place more toolbar
> icons". Both pretty good reasons I think. However after using this for a
> while, I noticed that in most cases only about 10% or less of the entire
> bar does actually contain useful information. The bigger problem though
> is, that it completely breaks with Fitt's law. When using the pulldown
> menu (all the way on the right), you get a list with mostly very short
> entries all the way on the left. 

We might be able to fix this with egg combo. If it exposeses its tree view 
we could just set the rules hint, but kris just told me this is probably a 
no. maybe they're will be a wrapper function, don't know... 

On the other hand at least in my experience I don't use the drop down this 
way hardly ever. More often than not I use it for type ahead completion (its 
intended purpose). The history list is in the go menu at the bottom, so i 
really think this is a more common use. 

> Constantly moving all to the right and
> then all to the left doesn't really strike me as ergonomic and I found
> it so irritating, that I tried to look for a better layout.
> I tried a lot of different ones including a Safary-like layout and
> combining my bookmarks and location bar but none of them were
> satisfying, until I ended up just placing the "All" and "Most Visited"
> topics left from the locationbar while still keeping a bookmarks bar for
> other bookmarks. 

This doesn't really fix the problem, since the same issue can still arise 
with short web addresses in this layout. The only real solution is to be 
able to set the rules hint on the drop down list. (if egg combo allows 
this). 

Furthermore we cant/don't want to do this for a few reasons. 

1). The bookmarks bar is a seperate entity from the regular toolbars, and 
the methods for adding/removing from it are different and we want to 
maintain this division. Its good for a11y in particular (actually bookmark 
toolbar editting is the only form of accessible toolbar editting in ephy 
right now, though we hope to fix this by 1.0) 

2). The All menu is really there to help muffle the noise of the screaming 
bookmarks menu lovers who complained about the lack of a menu. 

To be honest if I had it my way I would add mnemonic label to the address 
entry too (which would shorten it a bit), but everyone would probably scream 
at me. 

dave