All batched listing mentions "results" even when they don't represent search results

RF 4901

This is a pretty unhelpful bug report, Matthew. All our batched pages say that; I'm not sure what you would prefer it said, or how it worked, but it's probably not a Soyuz bug.

I'm reopening to make sure we put the batching links back in, since they have been removed which makes navigation in multi-page archives impossible.

Putting the batching links back in is bug 158574.

"Results" has a specific meaning in Web interfaces -- items that match a search. Currently we use "results" for all batched lists, regardless of whether you've done a search, which is incorrect. (You could argue that the initial list is still a database query internally, but that won't match the user's mental model. If Gmail referred to pages of your Inbox as "results", or Slashdot referred to its front page of stories as "results", they would rightfully be jeered.)

A minimal fix would be to remove the word "results" from the batching code, so that it refers just to numbers, e.g. "51 → 100 of 142".

And if we were to include a word, or to allow the word to be conditionalized according to the UI, what could that word be?

In <https://launchpad.net/~linux2go/+archive>, that word could be "source packages". In <https://launchpad.net/projects/+all>, it could be "projects". And in <https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+builds>, it could be "builds". However, in all three of those cases I think the nearby headings make it unnecessary to respecify what type of thing is being listed. And expressing the same meaning in fewer words is better.

There may be future cases where mentioning the type of thing in the batch navigation saves us from having to specify it in a separate heading (again, saving words), so the non-minimal fix would be to make it a parameter of the batching code. I'm not aware of any use cases for that right now, though.

Removing the words is trivial.

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 02:16:51PM -0000, Francis J. Lacoste wrote:
> Removing the words is trivial.

Well, unless you wanna consider updating all the tests. Or making it
optional in the BatchNavigator API.

The batch navigator does support alternate terms for singular and plural sets of objects, and it is used in many listing on launchpad. Each team/project can fix its use the batch navigator at their own priortity.