Re: Improvements of the website
Bastian Venthur <venthur@debian.org> wrote:
> MJ Ray schrieb:
> > 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.
That's double standards of effectiveness. Of course, one can edit XML
in a plain text field if wanted, with extra windows open on the syntax
manuals and so on (unless the relevant parts are memorised), but there
are better tools out there which make it much easier.
That's a stark contrast to MoinMoin (which does not use wiki syntax),
where there's only a textarea and having its manuals open, as far as I
can tell. Editing MoinMoin with anything better seems quite a pain.
There's not even an MVS-equivalent for it yet, is there?
[...]
> 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.
That's a documentation bug, not a structural flaw. If this is a big
barrier, I suspect an automated checkout/textarea-edit/send-patch
system can be built for www.d.o. Is it?
> In contrast to a wiki, where you can edit instantly.
Erm, no, I can't, at least not wiki.d.o.
[...]
> 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.
Well, if all one has is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail!
Seriously, web translation frontends are much better at what they do
than a wiki. Go try some.
> [...] someone
> (not you) was basically arguing against a fancy redesign of our homepage
> and it turned out that he mainly uses a textbased browser ;)
Some of our users, including some of the most appreciative ones (such
as people who have just almost killed their system but still have lynx
or telnet access to the web site), will be text-based browsing. There
doesn't seem much need to shut them out.
> > 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.
That trick assumes a user-level config change broke it, rather than a
system-wide one. But making a new user just to edit one site? Ow.
If a web application is unusable with a reasonable Iceweasel
configuration and doesn't document its particular requirements, then
that web application is broken, not the browser configuration. Fix
the buggy web application, not every user's standard web browser!
--
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Experienced webmaster-developers for hire http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
Also: statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder, workers co-op.
Writing on koha, debian, sat TV, Kewstoke http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
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