LabVIEW™ Toolkits and Applications

bookmarking and frames?

All of the product pages use frames to display a Table of Contents (toc) and the selected topic.  This provides an excellent interface for viewing the product information, but has two major limitations (bookmarking and linking) which are caused by the same problem:  frames don't show the URL of the current content in the address bar.

This problem can be viewed by browsing the LabVIEW Version Chooser pages.  Notice that the URL in the address bar does not change as different topics are viewed.  So if you find an interesting topic, the only way to bookmark is to right click inside the frame and bookmark (or add to favorites) from the right click context menu.  While this can get you back to a specific page, the page doesn't load in the website, but as a standalone page which leaves no navigation or link back to the site.  Here is an example:  http://www.dataact.com/LVC_Help/Using_LVC_Action_Interface.htm

The solutions under test:

There are two related solutions under test on the dqGOOP Toolkit pages  The first solution is applied to all of the topics in the "Overview of dqGOOP" section, while the second solution is applied to the topics in the "Installing dqGOOP".  Both solutions allowing linking directly to the source page or through a query:

example source page linking

soln 1:  http://www.dataact.com/dqGOOP_Help/021_Overview_Performance70.htm

soln 2:  http://www.dataact.com/dqGOOP_Help/070_Installing_Installation.htm

example query linking

soln 1:  http://www.dataact.com/dqGOOP.htm?dqGOOP_Help/021_Overview_Performance70.htm

soln 2:  http://www.dataact.com/dqGOOP.htm?dqGOOP_Help/070_Installing_Installation.htm

You will notice that the URL in the address bar will match the query one once the pages are loaded.  However, solution 1 differs from solution 2 once you start to navigate after a bookmark (or link) brings you back to a page.  The URL in solution 1 doesn't update if you navigate to another topic (try selecting another topic in the "Overview of dqGOOP" section).  Now try solution 2, you will notice that the URL updates with each topic selection (try selecting another topic in the "Installing dqGOOP" section), but the entire page must be refreshed.*  This has the benefit that the URL always matches the content being viewed, but the refresh could be annoying.  What to you think?

Please send an email to info@dataact.com to let me know your preference:

solution 1:  URL not updated, but no page refresh (only topic frame) and bookmarking only by right clicking in the content frame.

solution 2:  URL matches content. but page refresh for every topic and bookmarking the standard way.

*The "Back" and "Next" links on the content pages have not been updated, so they behave like solution 1.  This test is best performed using Microsoft Internet Explorer, there are still some quirks with other browsers.