Re: Improvements of the website
MJ Ray schrieb:
> Bastian Venthur <venthur@debian.org> wrote: [...]
>> * I don't believe we should favor XML(-ish stuff) above simplified
>> markup when the target audience are humans. XML is good for many things
>> but definitely not for being edited by the casual user. [...]
>
> We have good tools for editing XML, which are much better than
> the tools we have for editing non-TextFormattingRules wiki texts.
The point is: All you need to edit wiki syntax effectively is a plain
text field (and optionally an inline spell checker). Really, wiki syntax
is that easy. In contrast to XML where you suddenly need "good tools" in
order to edit effectively.
>> Please think of the translators: [...]
>
> Erm, I am a translator, although I've not translated much of
> www.debian.org. It's a two minute job to edit a page on the site:
> find source file, update it, edit it, check it in. This can all be
> done quite easily from the editor's menus. CVS is so common that many
> editors can work with it well.
Yes, common for you, me and other techies. But you know, not everyone is
a geek.
BTW it takes definitely more than "two minutes" if you first have to
find out what to do, what to check out and which page to edit. In
contrast to a wiki, where you can edit instantly.
>> * Moving even more towards a programming style environment by
>> suggesting gettext for translations, seems very inappropriate and would
>> raise the barrier for non coders even more. Translating text shouldn't
>> be so complicated, if it can be made as easy as editing a wiki or CMS.
>
> Translators also have good tools for handling gettext. What's more,
> if we used gettext for more of the site, we could use nice web
> translation frontends more easily. I'm not sure it's worthwhile, but
> it seems a better option than the wiki.
If you mean with "Nice web translation frontents": "someone can enter
translated text into a webfrontend", than it sounds pretty much like
"wiki" for me.
>> * I don't understand what you mean with "undocumented browser
>> dependencies". Never had a problem with any wiki and the different
>> graphical browsers out there. I assume you mean text based browsers?
>
> Not unless Iceweasel is suddenly a text-based browser. My
> configuration is a bit different to defaults, for various reasons, but
Hmm, ok. "a bit different to defaults" (what ever this means) and
suddenly you're not able to edit a wiki anymore? I think we shouldn't
take your setup as the reference for the quality of a wiki. Especially
since most wikis don't require anything special like javascript or even
flash.
This reminds me BTW of an IRC conversation a few hours ago where someone
(not you) was basically arguing against a fancy redesign of our homepage
and it turned out that he mainly uses a textbased browser ;)
> if the wiki documented its requirements, I expect I could set
> something up quite quickly. Instead, AFAIK, I either spend time
> trial-and-erroring it, rummaging in its sources, switch computer or
> just ignore wiki.d.o as broken until it's fixed. What's easiest?
Again, your setup is probably broken. If you broke it on purpose and
*really* wonder why wiki.d.o does not work anymore for you, I'm sorry.
But I have a simple trick for you: just create another account with a
default iceweasel setup. Should work out of the box and takes max 1
minute to setup.
> Ignore wins so far. Thank $DEITY we have a decent access route for
Hmm your arguments weren't very convincing for me, but I guess that's
pretty much the same you're thinking about mine.
> editing the main web site instead of a nasty web form.
Maybe we have some kind of generation gap here, some people prefer to
work with their well known all-purpose tools while others are already
comfortable to use e.g. a browser to check their mail or edit a wiki.
Cheers,
Bastian
--
Bastian Venthur http://venthur.de
Debian Developer venthur at debian org
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