The web site

[Brian T Rice]

Hi again,

I apologize for replying to myself, but I want to keep this relatively
single-threaded. The replies have all been helpful.

To the point:

I don't think the wiki will or should really go away. The best solution to
get people to really use it well is to use the best, and in my mind that
means CLiki - http://www.cliki.net/CLiki . This defaults to HTML syntax
and so doesn't have much custom syntax, except for the useful bits which
are very flexible anyway. I think the Lisp specification lookup syntax
could be re-used easily for our glossary needs, and it seems to handle
categories very well.

For the main website, I have already started hacking a bit. At first I was
intent on keeping the source intact, but too much needs to be done, and I
don't want some implicit expressiveness of CVS getting in the way, so
instead my intent is to throw out the zsh-based build system that seems to
have grown in an ad-hoc manner. To that end, I have copied the static
parts of the site to http://tunes.org/new/ and have begun some editing and
review tasks to get things in order and mostly to *economize* what is
stated on the pages. The major edits will happen once I have combed
through things. (After the major edits, we could then go forward with
some automated lisp-based abstraction over html if it is warranted.
However, that part is entirely speculative.)

The major edits include things like consolidation of the major statements
concerning one aspect of the system to one hypertext node, and structuring
all the ad-hoc remarks into some cohesive thesis statements. Once that is
done, the elaboration process is what's important: technical plans in
detail, referring to existing literature as much as possible. CiteSeer
would be essential to making this work easily.

I'm very intent on de-politicizing the whole site, not because I oppose
the views (I in fact agree). My reason is simply that they don't belong in
that area of the site. If politics needs to be argued, there must be a
specific place for it.

One final remark: I am not touching the review section, and the glossary
will be relatively untouched until I can find a good reason to do so. So
if someone wants to work on that, please let me know. Also, new work
should go into the ./new/ directory, as an informal collaborative effort;
I may actually edit a thing or two there myself, and would want to make
sure that changes are going to the same place.  This can be "fast and
loose" for now, until we get things in good order. To make this work, just
bother me with the "ytalk" program while you're logged into tunes.org, and
if I don't reply, leave me an email note.

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
mailto:water@tunes.org
http://tunes.org/~water/