Re: Thoughts about the LilyPond web site

[David Kastrup]

Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:

> I find everything you say very convincing.
> I'd just like to add one more aspect to the "disclaimer" about someone
> having to challenge it: In addition to the general complexity of
> designing a website we have to face the issue that such a redesign
> would a) have to go through a potentially demoralizing review process
> and b) it would not only have to be "as-is" but it would have to be in
> a way that is suitable for the whole build process.

Which means that one cannot just click things together with some web
design tool resulting in a Flash page inaccessible to blind readers and
only rendering as intended on Internet Explorer.  Which is more or less
the standard for "pretty".

The degrees of freedom we have to work with is, of course, the
_organization_ of the content (what is where? what points where? what
does one get to read at a glance?), the wording, and the presentation as
far as it can be described by CSS.

I've actually just done

M-x eww RET http://www.lilypond.org RET

to take a look at how the Emacs-internal browser eww renders the
LilyPond pages.

Turns out that I have hardly ever seen a better-rendered web page within
Emacs.  Which does not mean that if people have convincing ideas for
reorganizing the actual content that there would be a problem with that.

But the tools and workflows for creating "modern" or "pretty" web pages
quite often mean a really big step backwards regarding accessibility,
standard compliance, universally acceptable rendering, resource
requirements and so on.

So our basic workflows starting from Texinfo input (and integrated with
the workflow of translators) are something that is not easily replaced
by something "more modern".

-- 
David Kastrup