Re: SEUL: Sample Webpages for SEUL-PUB

[Roger R Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

(Ack...please break your lines in future mails. Is difficult to quote
during replies when each line is >300 characters)

> Roger,
> 
> I agree with you that just providing yet another links-page is of little
>use. We should somehow add value. One suggestion is to create a set of
>links that will help the user in completing a given task. (Eg: Select
>Hardware -> Install Linux -> Install Office/Browser apps). It may be better
>for us to leave the question of Linux links to www.linuxlinks.com or
>www.linuxstart.com etc... We can focus on other parts that (probably)
>nobody is looking at.

I've been driving the Linux Knowledge Base project (www.linuxkb.org) to
finish sometime in the next few months. At that point, they will be an
ideal place to go to get details on certain categories, or how certain
things work.

I'm tempted to say we should either have actual documents describing how
to do certain tasks, if we want to go in the direction you suggest. Going
partway isn't going to be as useful as it could be, for either type of 
person looking at the site (the one browsing links or the one trying to
solve a specific problem).
 
> During the past week, I have been looking at using Server Side Includes
>and splitting the SEUL pages into individual fragments (eg Navigation pane,
>Content pane, footer and header plus, CSS). I have also observed that
>www.w3c.org's "Validate HTML" returns plenty of errors on our existing
>pages. We need to fix them. What priority are we assigning to 'clean' HTML?

In the past, I've been fanatic about minimizing the footprint of the
frontpage. We can afford to do css tho if it buys us more uniformity and
clarity.
As for 'clean' html, well, nobody's bothered us about the quality of our
html. i think if it works in browsers, then nobody really cares.
as you can see from my delay in answering my mail sometimes, i have much
more to deal with than making sure my html passes some test. :)
 
> My suggestions are as follows:
> * Use CSS for overall styling.
> * Use <Hn> tags strictly for content structuring and not for font-sizing 
> * No embedded FONT codes.
> * Use SSI "include virtual" directives to manage navigation, headers,  footers and page content that are consistent from page to page.
> * All pages should undergo some form of verification and be posted afterwards.
> * Provide certain links on *all* pages (eg links to HOME, Search)

how does ssi work for this? do we have to add in extra html at the top
of the page that will have these links, or does apache somehow know
that it should add the extra html?
i ask this because of the archives...mhonarc automatically generates
them, and a number of our webhits come from search engines directly
into the archives.

> * We need to have a sitemap. Is there a script available?

i imagine somebody can get one off freshmeat. i haven't messed
with this.
 
> I intend to post the modified (& verified) pages in a day or two. 

Ok. I made some fixes to the seul-pub page (particularly the
css file in terms of filenames), take a look at the new ones
to figure out the differences.
 
> Regards,
> Anand
 
Thanks!
--Roger