Publicity needed

Wed May 12 14:35:30 CEST 2004

On Wed, 12 May 2004, Roger Price wrote:

> On Wed, 12 May 2004, Joe Armstrong wrote:
> 
> > What I think we're lacking now is good flashy documentation.
> > Comments?
> 
> Yessir!, not just web pages, but a third edition of "Concurrent
> Programming in Erlang".
> 
> > 	1) Your HTML should be validated
> > 	   spiders give up on unparsable data
> 
> An excellent recommendation.
> 
> > 	   This is how I start my pages
> > <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
> 
> That's almost true Joe.  That's HTML 4, and your page
> http://www.sics.se/~joe/erlang/ is in XHTML 1, but that's not a problem.

Right - what I meant was that the content should be validated. I actually
use several different DTDs and they are not all the same.

> 
> > <link rel='STYLESHEET' type='text/css' href='base.css'>
> >   2) We all choose the *same* template
> 
> Another excellent recommendation: a common "Erlang community"
> stylesheet.
> 
> > I highly recommend "Blue Haze" see http://www.sics.se/~joe/erlang/
> 
> This style sheet seems to me to be over-engineered and vicious in its
> attempts to circumvent structural markup.  Too much of the structure of
> the document is in the classes of the style sheet:
> 

I disagree - I spent a long time at http://www.oswd.org/ looking at
the different designs (they're all free) I liked BlueHaze since it
achives some nice table affects entirely without the use of tables
only CCS layout - IMHO this has remarkably little markup to achieve
the desired affect.

   http://www.sics.se/~joe/exJobb.html

has even less - which I've been playing with

>    <div id="header">
>       <span class="headerTitle">Erlang Users Club</span>
>       <div class="menuBar">
>         <span title="here">HOME</span>|
> 	<a href="http://www.sics.se">News</a>|
>    ...
> 
>     <div class="sideBox LHS">
>       <div>Welcome</div>
> 
> I would prefer to see a separation between the style of the "glossy"
> `Welcome to Wonderful Erlang-land', and the style of the technical
> documentation.  Ok, make the welcome pages flashy, as long as they meet
> WAI guidelines http://www.w3.org/WAI/, but use a sober style for the
> technical stuff - the sort of thing one would expect for a published paper
> in a journal.

  No - we are trying to increase market share - not publish papers.

  If you want to publish sober papers then do so there are hundreds of
these already) - what I'd like to see more of is:

	- good news
	- success stories
	- how to get started
	- how to do things 
	- ...
> 
> As an example of this, see the electronic proceedings of ACM MM '01
> conference.  The glossy introduction is at
> http://www1.acm.org/sigs/sigmm/MM2001/ Go to the electronic proceedings
> and you see the sober technical stuff.
> 
> I suggest the sober style sheet used for the ACM MM electronic proceedings
> would be better for Erlang's technical documentation.
> 

I prefer the PHP approach http://se.php.net/tut.php
with the ability for users to add their own documentation

'> >    3) We cross link each other - to increase our google ratings
> 
> Yessir!
> 
> Roger
> 

  Above all  I propose that  *we all use  the same style sheet*  - and
that  we link  to  each  other -  this  will give  the  entire web  of
information a consistent look and feel.

  This  seems  far  better than  having  a  lot  of small  sites  with
different looks and feels.

  It will also encourage cross links and better index ratings in google.

  So please somebody out there - copy the page

   http://www.sics.se/~joe/erlang/index.html

  Make your own page with the same templates - put it on your own server
and send it to me - and I'll link you in ...

	/Joe