Re: The state of our web site and standards

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2001 at 10:07:15PM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> True, I did think about this whilst writing that email. I will suggest that
> as pages are committed, we have a validator run over them automatically.
> Kind of like tinderbox, but for web weenies. :)

  which is one way of doing it, late, i.e. once the person who
did the job has commited.
  When you commit C file, any sensible person compiles and test it before
commit, I don't see any strong enough argument why HTML authoring would
be different from C authoring in this respect.

> >   I think I just got a request to get less mail in the future, sure
> > I will unsubscribe to the web list and look somewhere else.
> 
> Not at all, your input is always appreciated. Most of us just have a

  Hum, maybe I will have to resubscribe then

> terrible snap reaction to anything approaching the horrors of WML. :) [ I'm
> not allowed to talk about the horrors of PHP though... ;) ]

  The horror is putting an arbitrary change between the consumer and
the producer, forcing the latter to generate something which is in an
uncheckable format. Moreover the solution suggested requires rewriting
of the content for every html page server, bad for the server and debugging
IMHO.

> The web list has just picked up again, and it looks like it's time for the
> dreaded implementation argument we've all been trying to avoid... So, if you
> have any axes to grind (or preferably wisdom to share), get in quick.

  My suggestions are:
    - keep it simple and do it fast
    - provide templates for the various areas of the web site
    - serve static pages
    - provide tools to the authors to check their pages
    - forget about trying to gain 20% bandwith when serving images
      proper cache support and a single format is better (we used
      HTTP content negociation of images types at W3C it's hard,
      and not worth it unless you want to pass a political message).

We still fon't have a link to the Foundation pages on the top Gnome pages.
A lot of the content on the developper site will actually be generated
though XSLT from docbook, the PhP trick will not work for it (we will
use xsl:output="html" and the html struture from the stylesheet).

Daniel

-- 
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