Re: Virtual Directory Structure

["Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero" <famrom infernal-iceberg com>]

joerg jrsoftware de (2001-05-11 at 1615.48 +0200):
> Is there anything that prevents showing *both* names? The friendly
name could be used as the "title", the real name could be used as the
"actual URL". For example:

Nothing disallows it, as well as it allows to have the path as
title. This looks promising.

>  [+] My Home   /home/foo

Duplication? IMHO it should be under /home/ like the rest (just center
on it when starting). And please remove My, it is relative (your my or
my my ;] ). I never understood it, maybe it is a culture matter, in my
languaje you do not normaly say "I", so when people insists with "I,
me, my", it looks a bit weird; so please do not take it as offense.

>  [-] User Directories   /home/
>     [+] J. Random Hacker   jrh/
>     [+] Joe Avarage User   joeuser/
>     ...
>  [+] Removable media   /mnt/
>  [+] Hardware Devices   /dev/
> 
> etc.

Do we leave the first / or remove it? If top entry is / (which it
should, otherwise you can not view / per se), better leave only the
ending /. Another option is to remove it completly, but does not seem
a good idea, foo and foo/ is not the same (browsers add it if needed,
or IIRC the server does a redirect) and the idea seems to be helpful.

> This makes sure that nothing is hidden, plus it makes it easier for
experienced users to help a newbie. Filename text boxes etc. could
continue to show the normal folder names. And I don't think it gets
much more difficult for newbies. Actually, it's quite similar to web
browsing, where the text of a hyperlink is not equal to the name of
the referenced file.

Dialogs could also show the extra info if the user has the feature
active. Of course, boxes, URLs and others would look fine with real
names.

> > Problems:
> > - hides a bit
> ...this does not (shows more, actually).

Five modes: show both. :]

> > - does use " ", "_" and "/" like old style, so I guess people will
> > tear clothes (I guess they are happy with interfaces that give no
> > clues and do weird things, like some webpages)
> ... this does not.

You are showing name and description in one, not name and virtual
name. I guess it is better, cos people learn as they use it. Based in
the system a path descriptor tool could be created too.

> > - new things are not automatically translated, you have to add some
> > config to the system if new dirs appear, until then, a mix appears
> This is a problem that can be solved quite easily: Just have a
hidden file in each folder (.foldersettings or something) that keeps
its name and its tooltip explanation. If there's no file, show just
the normal name.

Supposing you can write to the dir, you get info, if you can not, you
never get the translation, so you have not solved anything. Other
problem is that you start populating the filesystem with small files,
and for remote disk, you have to fetch them.

Better use the metadata system or one based in rules as I proposed, if
noboyd have a killer solution. The rules one, IMHO is very flexible,
cos it adapts to new additions, with not really complex rules. If bin/
always becomes Applications, you will get the description for all
local bin/ dirs, as well as server bin/ dirs, or even user bin/ dir,
whoever owns the dir (or the machine), without need to actualize info
files when a new translation is added / changed.

I think this moves on. Any Nautilus coder here?

GSR