Fun with data islands

Besides all the recent work on the Scooby week-view prototype, I also recently got to work on a fun little one-off project that involved a presentation some of the OSAF folks are going to make to the Common Solutions Group .

They wanted a chart-like document that showed the work going on at OSAF, divided into different tracks, and indicating the different phase of development for each track. There was a need to use a lot of expandable (i.e., "Click here to see more ...") text to allow more of the chart to be seen in one eyespan. I learned a new word during the design discussions -- disclosure triangle , which is the little expando-triangle thingie in the Mac OS Finder that you click to see the contents of a folder.

This project turned out to be a great opportunity to play with XML data islands . Since it needed to be a template that non-developers could use, I created a data-source section in XML to hold all the content, and then programmatically built the page from that.

The current version of the code is up on the demo server here.