[development] how to display an extremely large document

[Jamie Holly]

I haven't seen anything done like this in Drupal (not saying something 
doesn't exist that I just missed), but a good example would actually be 
Google Reader. It loads content as you scroll the window down through 
AJAX. I have actually thought about using this on sites that get a bunch 
of comments. Load say 50 at a time, then have the next 50 auto-load as 
the user gets closer to the bottom of the page.

Jamie Holly



David Cohen wrote:
> I'm building a site to support a very large outline of legal cases. 
> There are thousands of nodes in the outline, each with a very small
> amount of text.  The outline is about 5 or 6 levels deep.  I've written
> some code to import the outline into the book module.  So the book
> hierarchy reflects the outline and the node bodies contain these small
> chunks of text.
>
> I'd like to display the entire outline in a single page.  This is not
> practical because of the overall size.  Still I'd like the user to feel
> as if they are scrolling through the entire thing, not visiting
> thousands of different pages.
>
> My idea is to use AJAX to accomplish this.  Imagine how google maps
> works (start somewhere but scroll to anywhere, use ajax to refresh the
> view after the scroll).  I'd like the same thing for arbitrary HTML.  In
> other words the browser starts with mostly placeholder divs and a small
> amount of content.  As the user scrolls around, the placeholders get
> replaced with real content.  And the real content which scrolls out of
> view gets cleaned up so the browser does not run out of memory.
>
> Has anyone encountered such a thing?  Or would be interested in
> collaborating on it?  Any reason why it would not work?
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Dave
>
>
>