[5195] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
forms question
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Price-Wilkin)
Wed Aug 17 22:16:15 1994
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 1994 04:08:09 +0200
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: jpw@jpw-slip1.lib.virginia.edu
From: John Price-Wilkin <jpw@jpw-slip1.lib.virginia.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
This is a bit out of line for this group, I realize, but I'm running
into a fill-out-forms problem again and again that just stumps me.
I have a form (http://etext.virginia.edu/ME-test.html) that takes a
query, sends it to a database, and returns a list of keyword in context
(KWIC) entries to the user. So far, no problem.
Each of these KWIC views is an HTML anchor to a larger view (1500
characters of context balanced around the beginning of the searched
word). However, I would like to make it possible for the user to choose
different views from the KWIC entry -- a view of the specific page, 3000
characters of context, 1500 characters of context, a bibliographic
entry, the entire work.
To see what this would look like, try the following:
http://etext.virginia.edu/bin/me-test?type=Single+word+or+phrase&query=lo
ndes+go
Now this obviously doesn't work. I've tried a number of things,
including making each result a radio button selection. What I don't
like about that is that you then have to choose a result and then make
your way back up to the top to press the [submit] button, a real pain in
the butt when you've got 100 items.
I wonder if there's any way to offer someone a set of options (the view
options in this case) that get registered as an environment variable
without submitting the form, so that after this one can choose an item
and have it be affected by the choice made earlier.
Sorry this is so muddle-headed. It's hard to describe without being
able to point to the screen.
jpw@virginia.edu
