(was: [Jgeneral] Web subject area in Wiki)
Brian, this is another very good question, which warrants a subject
(area) change.
In Wiki, there is physical page structure, which is subject to the
nesting constraint typically up to 2 or in certain cases 3, for special
cases, creating an additional utility level such as
*Addons*/category/addon or *UserName*/Something/Other or
Some/Thing/*Comments*.
All general-purpose pages, should be under a root parent; or if it's a
new multipage subject or a framework, it should be itself a root. Such
root should also be significant enough to be identifiable as a separate
area, and it's children need to meaningful separate units of thier
own. E.g. simply having Something/Comments does not qualify for
Something to be a root.
These constraints come from referencing considerations:
- children of root are likely to be referenced outside of its parent
- such reference needs to be short for practicality
- the combination Parent/Child has to form a meaningful phrase, such as
JAL/Guide or Plot/Fonts so that it could be used without aliasing
On the other hand, there is logical organization, i.e. how Wiki is
browsed as a hypertext repository. This creates a different set of
constraints driven by human nature of traversing semantically linked
information networks.
Such manual browsing should form a consistent mental image of the space
structure, so that with experience it became more comfortable and
faster. In particular,
- there is a "home", FrontPage always available location, like the only
button on the face of an iPhone
- FrontPage is where users starts browsing, and where they return to
start over when changing subjects or if lost
- So FrontPage should contain all the major areas
- every page should be intuitively and definitely reachable in a
limited number of steps, up to 3-4, i.e quickly
- number of links in a scope (one page or a section on a page) should
take into account short-term memory span of ~7 items
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_memory
(compare http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays
and http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/OlegKobchenko/Essays
In J Wiki, these considerations are applied as follows. At the beginning
there was a convention to put articles under few aggregating roots:
Essasy, Scripts, Packages.
With the advent of JAL, which has the natural logical level of
catagories, packages were merged into JAL and Scripts are in the process
of becoming addons proper, misc one-script addons, thus leaving a smaller
number of children only for inline snippets, which should still be
organized into sections on the Scripts parent page.
Some addons turned out to be large feature-rich frameworks, having
sevaral wiki sub-pages. So they required a more in-depth treatment, thus
together with FAQs, also a formal attribute of a platform, and other
extensive general purpose texts, they formed the Guides root page.
Returning to the concrete question is, Where will Web, CGI, JHP go:
FrontPage, Library, JAL or Guides?
All these are not mainstream J programming, so they definitely would not
go on the FrontPage, regardless how large they will be, which they wouldn't,
we just need suffiently standard and efficient frameworks. For the same
reason the won't go into Library, and also because Library shows what
forms, not want content code can assume. In JAL, those items which are
addons, will go too; but if it's a framework, which both CGI and JHP are
likely to be, they will also have physical roots; and since they are
related and there will be other web features like FastCGI, web
services, etc. they need an aggregator page, which is Web.
So we narrow down to a common part:
(Web as aggregator page linking to all the pages below)
CGI/Guide
CGI/... (frameworks)
JHP/...
and a couple of possibiities,
Web/FastCGI
Web/SCGI
Web/Other_one-page_topics
or
Guides/FastCGI
Guides/SCGI
Presence of pages under Guides root calls for listing them on the Guides
page itself. But they are also web-related, so they should be on Web.
This leads to duplication, referencial integrity issues, etc. So the
first choice becomes obvious.
I also noticed lately that Guides has a number of third-party
interfacing and interop articles, .NET, C#, etc. and I want to suggest
that, by the same token, they be moved to an existing aggregator,
Interfaces.
Both Web and Interfaces need to be listed prominently enough on Guides
page, but they are not Frameworks per se. So I propose to create another
section, called "Technologies" for this purpose.
Additional possibility is to expand the Guides entry on the Front page
to include it's section links: FAQs, Frameworsk, Technologies and
General.
An alternative to that, is to Create separate root pages for those
sections, also referecing them from the expanded entry on FronPage,
called "In Depth"; Guides will be its item with the content of what is
now General. So on FrontPage:
In Depth:
* FAQs
* Frameworks
* Technologies
* Guides
--- Brian Schott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Oleg,
>
> Please clarify regarding your proposal and the jwiki
> FrontPage. Currently FrontPage has 6 parallel subpages.
>
> Showcase - Showcase of J in action
>
> Guides - Beginners guides, FAQs, How-tos, etc.
>
> Library - J code library
>
> System - System documentation, feature requests, etc.
>
> Stories - Who uses J? Do you have a story to tell? Please
> add yourself to the growing community of J users.
>
> Links - Links to other J-related sites
>
> Will your proposal change the jwiki FrontPage
> a) by adding a seventh subpage, Web, and by putting new
> sub-subpages under Guides, or
>
> b) by adding new sub-subpages under Library , and
> newsub-subpages under Guides, or
>
> c) by adding new sub-sub-subpagesunder Library/JAL/... , and
> new sub-subpages under Guides, or
>
> d) something else?
>
>
> On Sat, 13 Jan 2007, Oleg Kobchenko wrote:
>
> + There has been a considerable amount of articles
> + related to Web programming in the Wiki, that it
> + calls for creating a root aggregator page with
> + hosting subpages and links to all such material.
> +
> + The rationale is that Guides and Scripts get overcrowded,
> + so it's hard to find things. On the other hand,
> + having common Web root, someone interested in the
> + subject will find all in one place.
> +
> + One page articles could be moved out from other
> + general sections, such as Guides under the Web page.
> + Simple Addons can stay where they are under Addons/...
> + Multi page subjects and frameworks, such as
> + potentially JHP, and JWebServer, will be at
> + the root level and linked from Web.
> +
> + Currently these are exsiting pages:
> +
> + Addons/web/jhp
> + Guides/CGI
> + Guides/FastCGI
> + Guides/SCGI
> + Scripts/FastCGI and SCGI Server
> + JWebServer
> + JWebServer/EventHandler
> + JWebServer/HttpParser
> + JWebServer/ObjectRequirements
> + JWebServer/Simple
> +
> + It is proposed to have it like that:
> +
> + Addons/web/jhp (link to JHP)
> + Addons/web/fastcgi (move FastCGI and SCGI to JAL from Scripts)
> + CGI/... (new standard general framework)
> + JHP/... (new framework)
> + Web/FastCGI (move from Guides)
> + Web/SCGI (move from Guides)
> + JWebServer/... (framework - leave as is)
> +
> + Guides and Scripts should drop individual references and
> + have one "Web" link under Frameworks in Guides.
> + This is to releave the burden of referential integrity.
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