Browse page and link references

[glenl]

The browse page contains a list of collections followed beneath with a table of instruments, composers, and styles that the user can use to refine a search. The problem is with the tabular data since links arriving here from the home page always appear to arrive at the same place (the top of the table.) A temporary solution in the first release leaves the browse page untouched but the links from the home page go to individual pages.

For discussion: The "temporary solution" is redundant. Do we,

1. Deprecate the browse page in favor of individual pages.
2. Convert the browse page to a list using bootstrap's flexible grids. Links arriving from the home page will traverse into the browse anchors more favorably than a table (i.e., they won't appear to go to the same place.)

[glenl]

Mark Van den Borre has weighed in on this after reviewing the prototype:

The links currently exposed by "show all" at the bottom of the front page: I would not point them all at one page crowded with multiple tables, but at a separate page per subject (a "by instrument" page for example). When one wants to browse all instrument links, no use pointing the user to a page with tables for composer, instrument and style. Just a link to a page with "by instrument" should be much clearer and get rid of some more tables.

[PaulMorris]

The main problems I see with using just the individual pages is they wouldn't fit into the global navigation as well as a single browse page does. Either we have more top-level menu items, or a drop-down menu, or leave them out entirely (and have to go back to the home page first to access them?). (It already seems less than ideal to me that the current "latest additions" page is not in the navigation.) None of those options sound that good to me.

Aside from the navigation they would also increase the number of pages in the site, with pages that won't have that much on them. Which also doesn't seem like a good thing to me.

Also, I disagree that it is a problem for the links to appear to go to the same place. We could rename them to "Browse All" rather than "Show All" so users would associate those links with browsing the whole collection. The browse page could either be a vertically stacked collection of lists (to make it less like going to the same place), or they could be arrayed in horizontal columns (like on the home page). I think I would like the column arrangement for its better use of space on wider screens.

[glenl]

The reason the links appear to go to the same place is that the tabular structure with categorical information in the columns doesn't map well to this kind of page linking, especially with one category having substantially more items than the others.

Boiling your comment down into a page description:

• Each category (Collections, Composers, Styles, Instruments) is an section with an h2 or h3 heading.
• Each heading has a named anchor for linking.
• Each category section may differ on column configuration based on its contents.

In addition,

• Make Composers last because it is the longest list (3 columns seems to help.)
• Also include a new 25 Latest Additions section in this page.
• All the home page links, including Latest Additions, will go to its respective section in the browse page.

[PaulMorris]

That page description sounds really good to me. And is actually better than what I was thinking. I had in mind basically the home page column layout but with full lists. But your description is basically like the following (on larger screens) and does a better job of "linking to different places" and handling the problem of composers being a much longer list.

25 Latest Additions
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    
Collections
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    
Styles
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    
Instruments
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    
Composers
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    
-------    -------    -------    -------    

Different sections could have different numbers of columns and column widths based on their content. For example, Latest Additions might work best as a single column. (Although I'm guessing that 4 columns will work well for the rest, except maybe for collections.)

(Eventually it would be nice to be able to search by date added and/or sort search results by date added. At that point having this list might not be needed. The link on the home page could just go to search results and they wouldn't need to be limited to just 25.)