The web site

[Brian T Rice]

Hi Massimo,

On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Massimo Dentico wrote:

> Brian T Rice wrote:
> >
> > However, my important consideration is the main site, which is in CVS. At
> > http://tunes.org/~seaslug/ , you'll find a Scribe-driven replication of
> > the languages review page. I may just insert the output to replace the
> > existing page for now, since it is at least more regular in grammar. Does
> > anyone have another idea? Generally I think that without objections or
> > suggestions that any effort on the actual site would be appreciated.
>
> I want to divide the review and glossary pages into one page for each item
> (language, OS, word ...), preserving the original pages as indexes and other
> sparse material. Any objection?

This is perfect if we wind up using CLiki. The language/OS/glossary pages
then just become a nearly-empty page specifying an index of the pages with
that category. Jeff had taken a shot at this for the language review in
Scribe, and ran into problems that he remarked on.

> Jeff Cutsinger:
>  > My experience is that scribe isn't very good. It's problematic in many ways,
>  > for example the poor quality of the output (this can be partially fixed).
>
> Probably is sufficient a simple type-setting language developed as Common Lisp
> macros. Unfortunately I'm not proficient with CL currently, but Araneida
>
>    Araneida - http://www.cliki.net/Araneida
>
> a CL web server, on which CLiki is based, *seems* to have such a thing;
> someone have any experience with this?

Jeff's complaints about Scribe have to do with the way it generates html,
not exactly html itself. He also noted that it can't quite read in its own
syntax (say, from a file), which made dividing up the language review
nodes nearly impossible.

Look at the formatting explanations on CLiki. It's very easy and yet much
more expressive than most Wikis. Araneida isn't much itself except for a
lisp webserver that sits behind apache and can handle dynamic content,
caching, and SEXP-based generation and has lots of hooks.

> As *output* I think that HTML+CSS is sufficiently flexible even for printing;
> as "proof" I point out this DTP package:
>
>    Cascade DTP - http://www.price-media.demon.co.uk/cascade.html
>
> So, at least initially, we don't needs a plethora of differents output
> formats.

I'm working directly in html+css right now. It's not bad if you know how
to use (X)Emacs and its sgml-mode.

> Brian T Rice wrote:
> > I'm mostly just tired of being associated with a project that looks so
> > dead ..
>
> Sadly, I agree. But even with modest effort we can improve this situation,
> let's start to work!

The HLL pages are going to take a couple of weeks for me to finish doing
everything that's basic to what I want. That's plenty of time for someone
to pester Tril about installing CMUCL + Araneida + CLiki via Debian,
removing hyperspec lookup and adding glossary lookup syntax, and porting
the Wiki and Glossary/Review content. However, an mail just bounced from
his Bespin account, so I'm not sure how available he is. :P Fare also has
root access, however.

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