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Re: case list page

On Wed, 18 Jun 1997, Billy Cravens wrote:

> erm892f@nic.smsu.edu wrote:

<large snip of several good ideas>

> > For my purposes (as a coach) - I'd love to be able to download the
> > document either by printing from a Netbrowser or as a document I could
> > manipulate in my own word processor. It might be useful (if a bit tough)
> > to be able to only get the 'new' information or specific schools that I
> > expect at the upcoming tournament. If the wordprocessing document wasn't
> > formatted for Word Perfect or Word or something, I would make each
> > paragraph a single line, some of them 1000 characters long, to allow for
> > line wrapping when I loaded the next into my word processor.

The heinously long line-wrap is:
a) probably not possible and
b) a really, really bad idea if it is possible.  This is because the 1000
character line would be unreadable in a regular browser, and everyone
would have to download it in order to read it in a word processor.  

My suggestion: remove hard returns (only include a "<p>" between sections
of the list, e.g. between school name and plan text, etc.) and let the
browser display it in a normal format.  If someone saves it as a text
file, it will either wrap automatically or, depending on your word
processor, you may have to do three search/replace commands to fix the
formatting.  Either way, not too difficult.  Printing straight from the
browser would be the best choice if you didn't need to rearrange the
information.

If you can't find someone to write the search system for you, you could
just set up the page to separate cases by school.  That way, someone could
go to the "New York University" section, for example, and see each team
listed, along with which case they ran at what tournament.  This wouldn't
be that tough if you started on it at the beginning of the year.  I
thought about it last year, but by the time it occurred to me, I already
had hundreds of case descriptions that I would have to move.  Combine this
with an email form for submission of cases, and you should be able to get
the site into a highly functional format without having to build it as a
searchable database.  Come to think of it, it might even be more useful
this way than it would be as a searchable index, since the cases from a
particular school would all be grouped together.  Usually, one knows what
schools will be at next weekend's tournament, so the crucial information
is "what have those schools run before?"

One further suggestion: separate the schools by region.  This will break
up the pages into more manageable chunks, rather than having to wait for a
250-page document to load into your local browser.  Within each region,
list schools alphabetically in the HTML document, with an anchor for each,
then put a menu bar at the top of the page with the list of schools.  That
way, if someone wants to know what USC runs, they can page down to where
they think it should be alphabetized, or they can look for it in the menu
bar.

The best approach would be to get a list of all of the schools in CEDA,
divided into regions (Greg Simerly at SIU can provide this), then set up
the skeleton of each page, i.e. create each region's Web page with just
the schools separated by horizontal lines.  Do this before the season
starts.  Then, when you get case lists, you can open up the appropriate
region and paste in the text from the list directly under the appropriate
school.  As I said, if you start it this way at the outset, it will be
easy to maintain.  If you can convince people to use the email form, your
job gets even easier, since each school's cases will be sent to you
individually, and they will already be labeled and in a standardized
format.

          --Alan

__________________
Alan Dove
N3IMU
ad52@columbia.edu
http://128.59.173.136/Poliolab/Alan/Dove.html
References:
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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