SEUL: Re: Test WWW site [long]

[Erik Walthinsen <omega@omegacs.net>]

> My thoughts entirely. What kind of file does sdoc read it's doctype
> definitions from? If it's understandable by mere mortals (ie non-linux gurus,
> and non-programmers), I might be able to help with this.

They're written in pretty dense Perl.  If you want, you can checkout
sys/web/lib/ to look through the handler code, and sys/web/bin/ for the 
sdoc parser itself (sdoc.pl).

As far as writing handlers, it would require decent knowledge of Perl, and 
some as yet unwritten documentation about how the handlers are supposed to 
operate.


> Good idea, at least for active people - remember there are a few hundred
> lurkers on -project. In that case, I think still implement the italics
> convention, but in most cases you would want to link to the persons homepage
> (not italics, as it's a link) instead of having mailto:.

Right.  Anyone with their name on a project should ideally have a webpage, 
no matter how sparse.  mailto links should be in italic, and there should 
be a mailto on everyone's homepage as well


> One comment: why aren't -pub involved (except me, it seems) at present?!

Because seul-pub has been silent...  That's why I'm copying these messages 
to the list, so I can try to get someone to wake up and help out....


> Ugh. I tried that once on my site, then gave up because of teh hassle of
> maintaining two seperate copies of most things. However, I belive it is
> possible to design with this in mind and have everything accessible without
> frames - it'll just be a bit less convinient for no-frames people.

sdoc can make things much easier.  There are plans (arma?) to add 
conditional operations to sdoc, so you pass the document through the parser 
with '-DNOFRAMES' and get the non-frames page, then '-DNAVFRAME' and 
'-DMAINFRAME' to get the primary representation.  Building the right 
handlers in sdoc to do that should be relatively simple (compared to some 
of the other [reentrant/recursive] handlers I've written).


> Fine, then just a link to them needs to be on the dev homepage. I don't
> really care where it is physically, I'm thinking about ease of navigation.
> ;-) Having said that, if we have a left-hand 'navigation bar', then the
> 'menus' approach becomes a lot less necessary.

'menus'?  Yes, I do think that archives should be accessible from the dev 
pages, and that is something that needs to be added rsn.

I should mention that when I'm designing this site in my head, I always 
think in terms of where the content lives in the filesystem.  Putting 
cross-links in is simple, and so fundamental a part of the HTML method that 
I don't even bother thinking about it.  My main concern when laying things 
out is that the content appear in the *right* place (fs-wise) the *first* 
time, so we don't have to hose out the site rearranging things every other 
week.

Anyway, just some 'insight' into how I approach this.... ;-)


> I think that explanation may have helped quite a lot of people! =8-)

Hmmm, I'll have to put that on the web then....


     Erik Walthinsen <omega@seul.org> - SEUL Project system architect
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