[ckan-discuss] thedatahub.org - some UI feedback

Mon Sep 19 21:56:20 BST 2011

I've been adding some data to thedatahub.org and was struck by a few
things relating to resources.

Generally
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Resource's name field comes first but is not used by the UI to render
the listing. The description field is used in full, but only has a
single line for the UI, meaning that description becomes the de facto
name.

I kept pushing the green plus icon to add a dataset. This icon
actually performs the function of expanding a resource to show its
details.  If a resource is expanded, that green plus shouldn't be
visible/possibly greyed out.

Very long URLs break the UI.

Linking to a file
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Why can't an HTTP head request fill in this form?

Upload
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This is auto filled. Yay. Buy, why is the MIME type being duplicated
in the format field? Format should almost always be the file
extension. Even if MIME type is more precise, file extensions are much
more familiar to a general/novice user. The format is what is
displayed to the user. Therefore, we should probably display what
makes sense to the user.