I'm currently implementing "Conversations" in Querki -- basically, every Thing can have Comment threads associated with it. The trick is displaying them properly. I don't want to display the Comments as part of the Thing's own page, for a couple of reasons. (To speed up load times, to avoid the work of loading the Conversations if I don't care about them, and to separate my concerns.) But I don't really want them in a totally separate page -- they pertain to this Thing, so I'd like to be able to see both the Thing and the Conversations at the same time.
So I believe what I want is a "windowpane" jQuery control. Basically, at the bottom of the page there would be a small tab, showing the number of comments and maybe a highlight if there are comments I haven't read yet. When I drag or click on that, it opens up the bottom of the page, and loads the comments into it, so that (on a larger screen, anyway) I can see the Thing in the top half, and the Conversations in the bottom half, each scrolling separately.
The question is, does a good jQuery control like this already exist? The ones I've found so far each have at least one major problem:
-- only deal with the side of the window, not the bottom;
-- are hard-coded to just deal with menus;
-- don't have flexible enough tabs; or,
-- have unclear or unacceptable (eg, GPL) licenses.
I'm sure I could write this sucker if I had to, but I'm hoping to avoid the work. Anybody have any recommendations of a good open-source control along these lines? Thanks...
