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[Haifux] Re: Tzafrir's take on the site

Shlomi Fish
Sun, 16 Sep 2001 04:24:14 -0700

On Sun, 16 Sep 2001, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:

> On Sun, 16 Sep 2001, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> 
> >
> > 5. I wholeheartedly recommend you to switch from filepp to WML. I never
> > found the C preprocessor enlightening, so I don't think a web-site powered
> > by something that is based on it can scale well.
> >
> > WML OTOH is designed with HTML in mind, and I believe it can do anything
> > filepp does and more. And it is bundled with a lot of useful APIs, and new
> > ones can be written using perl and/or m4. (I did not find m4 too much
> > enlightening either, but let's skip it.)
> >
> > 5. Some of your HTML is not conformant to X/HTML. WML
> > can fix that automatically.
> 
> It works well for me (it is quite simple, and misses some things, but it
> does the job well, IMHO).
> 
> If you think that WML is better, then please give a sample. I'm too lazy
> to start installing it and learning it..
> 

There's an RPM for you and I installed it on Mandrake 8.0 without any
problem. The WML site itself is an example for it. Otherwise, there's the
site I prepared for my IP-Noise project:

http://comnet.technion.ac.il/~cn1w02/

It doesn't demonstrate too much of what WML can do (but then again I did
not need much for this site), and I could not get the linkbar to work just
right (at least not without hacking at its own code), but it's there.

The sources are available from its CVS at the /site/wml sub-dir. For
information how to grab them, check:

http://developer.berlios.de/cvs/?group_id=161

The WML tutorials are not very long, IMO. And it would be worth your time
to read them.


> >
> > 6. I'd rather have a side navigation bar (as a tree) instead of a top one,
> > despite its side effects.
> >
> > 7. I'd rather not have centered titles other than the main title.
> >
> 
> What do others think here? (optionally private mail).
> 
> Note: I'm not sure I want to take the responsibility of the webmaster.
> Whoever will be the webmaster will have the final saying here.
> 

I volunteer to be the webmaster, at least temporarily (ASA Orr give me
access to the site's directory). In any case, such a
thing should be customizable with a macro or a CSS instruction.

> > 8. Can you have one common stylesheet file instead of the <style> ...
> > </style> tag? (again, WML can handle this automatically).
> 
> I tried it and it didn't work for some reason. I'll try again later.
> 

It's not critical, but a common stylesheet is a good idea, despite the
fact that we preprocess the site.

> >
> > 9. The front page contains too much information IMO. Can you out-source
> > some information to other pages?
> 
> As I said, that is in the process. Mainly a matter of cutting and pasting.
> 

OK.

> >
> > 10. And yet another reason to switch to WML - Its diversion mechanism
> > enables the creation of English/Hebrew pages from the same source. I
> > suppose the same thing can be done with #ifdef's, but in WML you can also
> > code a gettext() like mechanism.
> 
> From my experince: you need two seperate pages. The content is far too
> different. If the page is visual Hebrew then any gettext mechanism will
> not do. For logical hebrew it may work. OTOH the hebrew page may have a
> different content altogether.
> 

I agree that it would not work for visual Hebrew. However, since both Konq
and Mozilla (and gasp - IE) support logical Hebrew, I prefer we use it
instead. And to hell with the Netscape 4.71 people. 

Note that I don't plan on working too hard on the Hebrew version for the
while, but it should be an option. 

Regards,

        Shlomi Fish

> -- 
> Tzafrir Cohen
> mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
> 



----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [EMAIL PROTECTED]

A more experienced programmer does not make less bugs. He just realizes
what went wrong more quickly.


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