[imp] Highlighting Clicked Rows

[Eric Jon Rostetter]

Quoting "D. Patrick Caldwell" <tncbbthositg at gmail.com>:

>     I'm not certain this is the right place to talk about this, but I wanna

You can talk about it here, or on the dev mailing list, or file an
enhancement bug request at bugs.horde.org.

> throw this out there.  I use horde imp to access mail on my server.  I got
> tired of having to click the checkboxes to highlight rows so I wrote a
> little bookmarklet that adds an onclick event to each row.  It seems that

Some fields in the row already have purposes (e.g. clicking on various parts
might show the e-mail, or create a reply to the e-mail address clicked on,
etc).  So I don't think you want to make the whole row be a link to check
the checkbox, but only some unused part near the checkboxes.

I agree the checkboxes are small, and it would be nice if
"near misses" would check the checkbox.  But I don't think the whole row
would be appropriate in most cases, as there are usually already other
functions connected to the parts of the rows.

One thing I've taken to doing in my new html code is making sure I make
"near miss" clicks have a meaning, when possible.  Making the label of
a checkbox/radio clickable to set the checkbox/radio for example.  Now,
in most of Horde/IMP, there is no label, but there may be "near-by"
areas we can use, to make "near misses" act like "exact hits".

> this would be a reasonable feature to be added to the horde IMP
> distrobution.  I, however, don't know how to go about making that
> recommendation.  You can find the horde bookmarklet (works in firefox) at
> http://scripts.pcdesigns.net.  Here's the code:

If I understand your code correctly, I think it would break current features,
and hence I can't say I would endorse it as is.  But then, I could be
misunderstanding your code, as I don't really groke javascript, and I've
not tested your code on a live page, etc.

Having said that, I think there are _some_ places where we could definately
make more of the row clickable, rather than just the checkbox, but this
isn't a universal thing.  Something more universal would have a larger
impact on  the usability.

> It wouldn't be implemented exactly like that in IMP.  In fact, it'd be much
> easier and much more reliable on most browsers if we used a regex to get the
> msgbox name from the row id (i wrote this a while ago so I forgot exactly
> how the HTML comes out.

It seems like you have a good usability idea, but need work on how to
implement it consistently throughout the interface.

> Any thoughts?

I think you have highlighted a usability issue that could be addressed,
but I'm not sure your proposed code would really be of help.

> Thanks so much,
> Patrick

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Go Longhorns!