James Collins

Explain the problem as you see it

You’re working with a supertag that has lots of fields (a tall schema) but only a few nodes (not many records). In that situation, the current node-by-node layout becomes awkward because:

You need to scroll down through many fields to understand or edit the tag properly.

But the layout makes you scroll sideways across nodes to compare values.

When you open 2–3 nodes side-by-side, the field heights don’t stay aligned across the nodes, so scrolling becomes visually noisy and comparisons become error-prone.

So you end up fighting the interface instead of working with the content. The UI is behaving like “cards” when what you need is “a document/table”.

A specific time this bites (example)

Say you’ve got a supertag like “Incident Report” with 40+ fields (timeline, root cause, mitigations, contacts, systems impacted, severity, follow-ups), but only 2 nodes you care about (two incidents you want to compare).

You open both nodes next to each other to compare them. You scroll down to “Root cause” in node A… but node B’s “Root cause” isn’t at the same vertical position because earlier fields have different content lengths. Now you’re constantly re-finding the matching field in the other node. After 5 minutes, it’s pure punishment.

Why is this a problem for you?

Because your mental model is:

Scroll down the fields in a predictable order

While being able to compare nodes side-by-side without losing alignment

But the current experience forces:

Left-right navigation for comparison

Manual re-alignment because field rows don’t match heights

A non-document-like workflow that slows you down and increases mistakes

In short: it blocks efficient review and comparison when the tag is “tall” and the node count is “small”.

Suggest a solution

A “Field-first compare view” (table-like, but rotated):

Rows = fields (down the left, fixed/sticky)

Columns = nodes (across the top, scroll horizontally if needed)

Each cell = that node’s value for that field

Row heights are synced across columns (so each field row stays aligned)

Optional: freeze the field-name column and the node header row

Optional: allow expanding a cell inline (but expansion should apply to the entire row height so alignment remains intact)

This gives you the document-style “scroll down the schema” experience, while still allowing node comparison without the current misalignment issues.

If you want a punchier one-liner to include in the post

When a supertag is field-heavy and node-light, comparing nodes side-by-side is painful because field rows don’t align while scrolling. We need a field-first view (like table view rotated) where fields are rows and nodes are columns, with synced row heights for clean vertical scrolling and easy comparison.