On 11 Jan 2021 at 03:44:11 GMT, The Natural Philosopher 
wrote:

> On 10/01/2021 17:23, TimS wrote:
>>  On 10 Jan 2021 at 15:35:20 GMT, Ahem A Rivet's Shot 
>>  wrote:
>>
>>>  On 10 Jan 2021 15:13:39 GMT
>>>  TimS  wrote:
>>>
>>>>    On 10 Jan 2021 at 12:33:26 GMT, Ahem A Rivet's Shot 
>>>>    wrote:
>>>>
>>>>    > On Sun, 10 Jan 2021 12:15:58 +0000
>>>>    > The Natural Philosopher  wrote:
>>>>    >
>>>>    >>  So PHP is not equivalent to JavaScript. PHP is fine at
interrogating
>>>>    >>  databases and doing a lot of server side stuff, but for popup
>>>>    >> dialogues and menus that expand you need Javascript.
>>>>    >
>>>>    >  I thought those could be done in HTML and CSS these days.
>>>>
>>>>    Not if you have a sequence of popups, where the content of a subsquent
one
>>>>    depends on the choice made in the previous one. And the choices in
them,
>>>>    or even whether they are presented at all, depends on what you read out
>>>>    of your databases server-side.
>>>
>>>   I'd think sending the whole decision tree up front should work, it
>>>  worked fine back when I was doing directory trees in early JavaScript on
>>>  Netscape 2.
>>
>>  Er no. It will get out of hand when you have 30 in the first popup, 40 in
the
>>  second, and 30 again in the third. When I did the front end to an assets
>>  database at my last job, that's how I started it. I could see it wasn't
going
>>  to scale.
>>
> Actually it doesn't get out of hand,
> As I said in order to have a rapidly navigable store inventory I sent
> the whole bloody stock list down sorted by category as a giant series of
> hidden  and used javascript to open up the parts of the tree the
> user wanted to view.

In my case it *did* get out of hand. This was the inventory for a Europe-wide
network. 30 Pops, a dozen bits of kit in each, many with a dozen interface
boards, each with 8 or 16 ports. That gets you down to the individual port
with its cable to another bit of kit (typically, Juniper router port to
Alcatel optical port). Before I knew enough about javascript and PHP, I was
downloading all 34000 options down as one block, something over half a meg of
stuff, and links were slower 20 years ago. Using iFrames helped a lot.

Today I'd do it rather differently, but then the guy who was at that time just
starting this project resigned with half a day's notice, so I got half an hour
of his time to get up to speed. Not easy at first as at that point I'd heard
of javascript but never used it, and never heard of PHP at all.

If you wonder wny that might be so, given I'd been writing software since
1965, I got switched to Operations in the early 90's and essentially stopped
being involved in any software development.

> Loaded far faster than my banking software does these days.

That's because they use that Jquery bollox instead of insisting on strict
HTML5 compliance.

--
Tim

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