Strategies for SubSections
By dram , Section Help! [] Posted on Tue Apr 30, 2002 at 12:00:00 PM PST
I have been debating whether or not to use subsections on my site. I have already done away with topics since they are more or less useless. However they did provide one feature that just having a half dozen sections can't, they told the user a bit more about the story and where to find other similar stories. This, quite clearly, was the purpose of subsections. But subsections provide their own unique problem, how do you display them? After talking with people in #scoop I have come up with a few ideas but I don't see any of them as perfect and I wonder if anybody else has some better ideas.

Hillct has implemented a dropdown box using JS on beta.evilplans.net. While this looks nice being dependent on JS is a bad idea. Even if we use dropdown menus created with HTML/CSS they won't render correctly in Lynx or older browsers. Another thought is to have a box display the children sections when you are viewing section stories. This would be somewhat like Yahoo!. If you go here you will see the name of the 'section', in this case Chats and Forums, and its parents, Home and Arts. Then below that you see a list of 'subsections', the Categories. Under that you will see the list of sites, instead of a list of sites this is where the story intros would go. One problem with this is that a subsection might have more than one parent, so you might end up with three or four lines of parent links all leading to the same child. (I saw a site where they were doing this, but I do not remember which one it was. If you know please put a link in a comment below.) Also, this pushes the intro texts further down the page, making the site slightly less user friendly. However, this can be resolved by putting a list of children in a box on the side of the page. Right now those are the only two ideas that I have heard or been able to come up with. What are other ways of displaying subsections that people have been thinking about putting into use? What does K5 plan to do?

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