Single Comment

That's a different context. You were suggesting it be placed in the legalMoves array, which is an array of complete moves.

Well, I am just using legalMoves as a vehicle to transfer information from the GAME code to the JavaScript in the move-entry pages, because at this point it seems the only way to transfer information that way. I don't care much whether the information is a move or a poem. Indeed ["movetext"," @-"] is not the representation of a move like JavaScript uses in its legalMoves array, because neither "movetext" nor " @-" are valid square coordinates. But their presence in the legalMove list would not hurt the existing JavaScript, because neither of those would match the coordinates of a clicked square. And the code I proposed would remove it from the array before the existing code gets a chance to do anything with it.

I agree it is an ugly kludge; the other proposal I made, sending all the possible suicides @-dest as ["@",dest], and all possible freedrops as [piecelabel,dest] would be cleaner, as these actually are moves recognized by Game Courier. It is just that they are moves that cannot be described by square coordinates. So the existing setlegal system cannot handle these move types. And the current JavaScript would choke on them, as it would try to highlight a square with id '@' without first testing whether that actually exists.

It does have it unless you are using an old browser with inadequate support for HTML5.

Hmm, strange. I am using FireFox, which updates itself almost every other day, and until this morning there never was an auto-complete in Play mode. But suddenly it started to display "Type for legal moves" in the movefield, and now the pull-down menu appears. From the screenshot I made yesterday you can see it did not print that text then. And the strangest thing is that it started doing it without reloading the page: When I pressed Play and got the page for moving in the start position it initially did not print it, and did not show a pull-down menu on clicking. But then I selected a pawn, which made the first part of the move appear in the move field. When I clicked the move field then, I got a drop-down menu with the three possible moves this Pawn could make. But I am pretty sure I was still on the same page.

As you type in a move, it narrows down the list of moves to those that might match it.

OK, so HTML-5 abuses this term for drop-down menus. Anyway, no matter how it is called, as far as I am concerned it is a completely useless feature, always much more cumbersome even than the methods for entering a move by mouse clicks that already exist. E.g. to enter a suicide or a drop as a side effect of an already entered move (i.e. after continuemove), one can use setlegal to send a list of fake moves with the new location of the just-moved piece as origin. (Because I cannot pass '@' or a piece label as origin.) The user could then switch on the higlights by a (logically unnecessary) click on the piece he just moved to switch on the highlights on the destinations, and pick one of the destinations. That would then automatically send the fake move to the server. The GAME code will be aware that it has faked the origin of the move, though, and can use rewritemove to replace it by the piece label (if it was prompting the user for a freedrop) or by @ (if it was prompting for a suicide).

The point is that I want to get rid of that unnecessary mouse click. Not even so much because that reduces the amount of work you have to do to enter the move by another 50%, but because it is a counter-intuitive thing to do, as you don't really want to move that piece, but just want to switch on highlights for destination-only moves. Always automatically selecting the only piece that can move, by embedding the JavaScript code I gave before in the continuemove page, would achieve that. It seems the only method that would allow the entry of the continuation move with only a single mouse click.