[Sigia-l] Facets, Flash, and Fun

[Listera]

"Joe 10" wrote:

> Conversely, when one slides slowly, trying to hit a specific point
> you get interim data points some of which have no corresponding
> change in result display. Towards the middle of the "Maximum Price"
> slider I read: 981, 1000, 1019 as I move as slowly as I'm able (since
> there are no increment buttons). Are those numbers relevant to a
> possible selection? If I had another slider set differently would
> they reveal or hide product choices or are they just mathematical
> increments?

These are valid objections, but eminently and easily solvable. Slider, as an
abstraction, is just another way of sending a query to a database, so you
can calibrate it any way you want to, by changing the length of the slider,
min/max, incremental ticks, snap-to, heck, even acceleration wrt mouse
movement, all in real-time. Sliders are also one of the UI widgets that can
be easily turned into re-usable components, applicable to many different
dataset/filtering situations. The crucial problem with such real-time
sliders (apart from UI implementation issues like the one you spotted) is
that they overtax the network and the DB when the user keeps sliding with
abandon, sending a query to the DB with every move of the mouse. You could
sort of go around that by having a two-action approach, slider to set the
point and an Apply button to reduce the data display, but that defeats the
fluidity of the 'sliding' paradigm. With a limited dataset, or one that can
be easily cached, sliders do OK.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba