Publicity needed

Wed May 12 13:55:43 CEST 2004

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.

> <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:

   <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.

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.

>    3) We cross link each other - to increase our google ratings

Yessir!

Roger