== Report of Meeting 2023-05-25 == Present: Ed Gottsman, Raul Miller and Bob Therriault
Full transcripts of this meeting are now available on the its wiki page. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki/Report_of_Meeting_2023-05-18 1) Ed started the meeting off with a demonstration of his newest iteration of the J wiki browser. Ed has moved away from his hover approach for content navigation. Structural navigation which is the navigation that travels across the structure of the wiki remains responsive to the hovering. To change the webview when hovering over content, you now have to click. This removes the issue of webviews changing as you move across content pages. Stephen Therriault had mentioned that a top ranking might be good for search results, but Ed felt that this would not be available, as there were results coming from a number of different sources and it would be difficult to resolve conflicts. Raul wondered what the issues were with the hover based approach. Ed felt that Stephen had made the point that an expert may be able to use the interface, but that a novice would struggle without direction. Ed also felt that hover creates changes that are not easily reversible. 2) Bob thought that there should be consistency between the structural navigation. At the moment, some of the structural areas do require clicking. Blue links are content pages and are easily identifiable as clickable. The green columns would be structural with scrollability. The grey stripes indicate horizontal space saving or column compression. They allow a safe space to move up and down columns without collapsing the column. Bob wondered if the grey stripe was necessary and Ed pointed out that it was because otherwise the user would not know why the behaviour changes with small movements. Rauls suggested that a reverse of having the centre strip be white with the edges being shade to indicate active areas for column compression. This is clearly an area that requires more thought and Ed is diligently working his way through the process and feels that he has enough feedback to work through the next week. 3) Bob showed the work that he had done on the Primer. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Help/Primer/001Start_here The new version has simplified the look and the navigation is more focussed on the Primer itself than the previous version. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Help/Primer/093_Fork Bob planned to use J9.4 as the example version because the error messages are much clearer. Bob also wanted to focus on direct definition because that seems a bit nicer to introduce explicit definitions than using the n : m form. 4) Raul wondered if there might be some type of an index available. Bob thought that he would supply an index at the check points at the end of each section. Raul suggested that the Help/Primer category might be useful to link back to the Index page. This requires extra clicks to see the index page. Ed suggested a vertical stripe of links to the different pages would allow the page to always have access to the other pages. Bob wondered if the Sidebar might be able to be used for this, but Ed felt that the Sidebar should be consistent for the user. 5) Bob suggested that the JQt IDE be used in the Primer for consistency and that many of the things that the Primer show are easily shown with JQt. An example is the GUI pages which currently are based on J602 interfaces. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Help/Primer/102_GUI_part_2 The plan would be to use the Primer as a way to guide newcomers towards being developers, since many of the packages such as plot are included in the Primer. It may be possible to tease learners with what is possible. Ed felt that the Primer then becomes a good place to put links that will direct the user to more learning and may be an interface to the wiki that benefits newcomers. 6) Bob suggested that there might be some reduction to the Sidebar that were no longer required, such as the link to the prototype wiki. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Sidebar 7) Ed wondered if there were any benefit to having J on the web integrated with the wiki. Raul explained that there are two ways of having J on the web: one was the playground https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:J_Playground_N.1 which is driven from each user's browser through WASM or JHS which is HTML and driven from the J engine that the user has downloaded. Ed wondered if the Primer could be made into a lab. Bob felt that it could, although some pages would need to be broken up due to length. Bob also mentioned that the Primer currently talks about the Vocabulary from the original dictionary and that he is planning to use NuVoc as the reference. There was then a discussion of the Vocabulary and NuVoc and the strengths and weaknesses of each until we wrapped up the meeting. For access to previous meeting reports https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki_Development If you would like to participate in the development of the J wiki please contact us on the general forum and we will get you an invitation to the next J wiki meeting held on Thursdays at 23:00 (UTC) Next meeting is June 1st, 2023. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm