Tesmond's Useful Design

iFrames, do they even still exist? Well integration with systems isn't aways APIs, XML and JSON magically working in harmony.  Some times you have to integrate a web app into another site as quickly as possible, maintaining the sparation to avoid unpleasant upgrade costs. iFrames intially appear to be a great solution, but they do present a number of horrible problems.  The worst offender IMO is the height property.  Why on earth does setting the height to auto or 100% not allow the iFrame to fit the content it contains automatically?  This would seem the most logical and common option, who likes scroll bars inside scroll bars?  Well I guess those higher powers that design specifications seemed to decide that scrollbars are great. So far the best solution I have found so far is at Dynamic drive , a bit of JavaScript that automatically resizes the iFrame to fit the content.  However, a word of warning I found I had to make some minor pixel adjustments ...

Search technology is a great interest of mine, fast accurate searches make a massive different to any information retrieval task.  How much relevance ranking, search faceting, related terms have made a massive different. It certainly appears to me that no matter how well designed a nativation hierarchy is, after a certain number a search engine is dramatically superior.  I am unsure if there has been any research into maximum acceptable items contained within a navgation hierarchies is useful, but they quickly become unusable to anyone other than the original archiver when they span more than 3 tiers and although the number of items within each tier could vary I would suggest that anything larger than 1930 items would be extremely difficult to navigate without a search tool.  This is assuming a 3 tier hierarchy with 8 items in the first and second tiers and 30 in the final tier. After reading an article on designing a mobile autosuggest it did remind me of one of t...