Re: [PATCH] gitweb: make leftmost column of blame less cluttered.

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Oct 4, 2006, 08:12 UTC
Message-ID: <7vsli4jy8o.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <20061004024837.4462.qmail@web31808.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Luben Tuikov <ltuikov@yahoo.com> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> It is not that I don't like it.  For example if we didn't have
> the block-per-commit-coloring, then we'd make use of this, but it
> seems that the block-per-commit-coloring exists for the purpose to
> show conglomerations of same-commit lines, thus obviating the need
> to repeat it (commit-8) every so many lines.
>
> The other question is how many lines should the repeat-chunk be?
>
> In my case I'd like to set it to infinity, since the
> block-per-commit-coloring gives me the same information.

Not that I particularly care that deeply, but my intention was:

 (0) having commit-8 on every line was distracting;

 (1) grouping clue comes solely from the zebra shading;
     placement of commit-8 does not have anything to do with the
     grouping.  It was just that the old interface had N
     commit-8 links for a group that consists of N lines.  I
     made it to approximately N/20 links, and you are in favor
     of having 1 link per group.

 (2) commit-8 is the only visually obviously clickable thing to
     get to the commit.  Having them only on the first line in
     the group means for a large group it would scroll off the
     top after reading all the lines in the group through to
     decide it is worth inspecting; think of a case where one
     commit added 80 lines of code and each line is shown in
     14-dot high font on 1024x768 display which would give you
     50 lines or so at most.

View blame output of README from git.git and scoll down to around line 400 to see what I mean, with an window that is around 30 lines. Jon's ASCII art extends for about 40 lines or so.

Put it another way, it is a redundancy just like the same set of links people place at the top and the bottom of a page. It is redundant in the sense that you can always scroll to either one, but having closer to the mouse pointer helps accessing them. It is different from the other redundancy we love to hate ;-) that the shortlog page had -- commit link and the clickable commit title were immediately next to each other and there was no argument for that redundancy from accessibility point of view (the argument was purely "is the clickable commit title obvious enough?").

> The middle ground as it seems to me, neither infinity nor 1, is
> to just use the block-per-commit-coloring and use your idea of printing
> the commit-8 only on the leading block row with mouse-over author
> and date info. That's an excellent idea.*

I am not quite sure what you mean by this.