== 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
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