Re: Thoughts about the LilyPond web site

[David Kastrup]

Joram <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi David,
>
>> 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.
>
> That is a very bad style of communication on your end! I am *not*
> talking about clicking, not about a flash page, not about non-standard
> tools and not about the Internet Explorer, ok? These are just
> insinuations. With this attitude you can indeed scare away all possible
> contributors.
>
> On the contrary, I am talking about using up-to-date web-standards,
> html5 and css and producing an accessible website.

HTML5 has been ratified last October.  It is too new to be supported by
a majority of installed browsers.  At any rate, our HTML generally is
written by texi2html.  Even if Texinfo offers the ability to put in
user-defined HTML passages, it would not make much sense to use it for
inserting considerably newer constructs than the bulk of the manual will
carry.

> Most modern approaches care pretty much about standards, the times of
> flash and IE are over.  Not everything is good, but much better than 5
> or 10 years ago.

HTML4 has been standardized in 1997, 18 years ago.  So unless we are
jumping straight to a standard passed just 4 months ago, we'll be
working with rather long established technology.

>> 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".
>
> I don't know the details of these translators etc. but I suppose a lot
> can be done just using CSS. At some point also this workflow will boil
> down to html, right?

Sure, but mainly as the target format of a convertor that we don't
ourselves maintain.

> And I am not talking about the contents, because they are already
> formatted in a good syntactical manner html-wise, but about the
> overall layout. And when I look at the page right now, there are divs
> and classes and everything needed for what I proposed. And once,
> again: I do not talk about the structure and workflow but the
> design/appearance.

Much of that can be influenced by CSS, and we have had several changes
in the last years (easily seen by comparing the documentation and web
pages for 2.19, 2.18, and older versions).

And LilyPond's web presence has looked significantly better than
basically any other Texinfo-generated HTML for decades anyway.

> And sorry, but probably < 1% of the users are viewing the website
> using emacs. So I hope this is not the design goal of the website.

"Accessibility" in the GNU project is often tied to "Emacspeak" and
similar.  Admittedly this is a strawman argument with regard to LilyPond
documentation since it would be pointless to be reading the
documentation in eww rather than in Info mode.  However, eww is sort of
representative for text browsers, like w3 or Lynx.

> If I find some time, I might do some more specific proposals on small
> rearrangements of the content of the main page.  For the layout I
> won't dare to suggest things.

When a proposal is made in the form of a patch to LilyPond, it becomes
obvious rather quickly what kind of changes are easy to do given the
current framework, and what kind of change will be hard to accommodate.

-- 
David Kastrup