The TUNES Website overall plan

[Brian T Rice]

Hi again, everyone.

This is partly to let everyone know what's going on with the site, and
where I want to move things. However, it's also an exposition for the
purpose of answering my own questions about the design.

I have been revising a few pages here and there, splitting up and cleaning
up explanations, and de-politicizing the explanations in key areas where
the politics are really obstructing the explanation. In the process, I
have been trying to form a new picture of the site as a whole. Here's an
outline of my ideas so far:

OVERALL

The tunes.org site will consist of two main implementations, one for the
heavily-collaborative, fine-grained background knowledge and discourse
about Tunes; the second part will be traditional static content whose
purpose is to be the official detailed plan and documentation page for
what we produce to be eventually call "TUNES". Both the static and
collaborative content may be implemented by a pre-processing system, which
could involve html pre-processing, or SEXP-based macro-expansion and
specialized escaping syntax (such as Scribe), but the concepts are the
same. The general philosophy of the two can be contrasted merely by
looking at the disclaimer at the top of CLiki pages: we publish and stand
by the static site, and the rest is up to whomever. :)

CLIKI

The main idea for the CLiki is that any background knowledge, particularly
about other systems that needs to be updated, would all be there. So the
Glossary has been moved there, and the Review project is now there. Also,
what seems to be the right approach for now is to move all papers,
articles, and essays about TUNES to it. So there is an "essay" topic now
for that, and I have linked to the papers listed on the main site's
"Papers" page. Basically this allows people to write about TUNES on ANY
site and link to it on ours; this is important - we no longer need to
worry about what we are and aren't publishing, or whether someone's views
aren't being heard. I suppose I should mention the fact that CLiki really
isn't suited for long, large essays, despite supporting most of the useful
HTML needed; the main problem is cluttering up the namespace, and the fact
that the linking system is generally wasted, although CLiki's categories
help a bit.

MAIN SITE

As for the main site, my concern now is to successfully remove any
statements that indicate anything other than technical content. Generally,
the site is suffused with a slant for everything. There's self-commentary
everywhere, and this just looks bad, to say nothing of distracting from
technical content. Furthermore, many statements are duplicated, and many
arguments are structured into attacks on existing systems. The latter are
clearly "essays", and my general intention is to move them to the CLiki.
To help this along, there are now CLiki nodes dedicated to each
subproject, although Review is notably absent right now. I think that
Review can be generally considered "disbanded" in the sense that it's not
going to be OUR publication any more, but a shared issue, with the
maintainer being someone who eyes the logs and handles simple rollbacks
and organization issues. But I digress: each subproject has a node where
notes and comments can be appended or linked-to. They're all bare right
now and may have more information later as a base amount than they do now.
An important aspect of this is adding links from the static tunes.org site
subproject areas to the corresponding CLiki areas, which I have started to
do for the major subprojects. Those which I haven't are just the ones not
edited yet. So there's a bridge here between commentary and the site.


I have more to outline, but I'd like to know what amendments or comments
you have so far to make, and this is long enough already. Mostly the devil
lies in the details of the old site.

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