version control on website

[Mark Johnson]

Karsten Wade wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-09-15 at 15:12, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> 
> 
>>I see your point, Tammy, but my feeling would be to opt for only two (or
>>three) subheadings under the current "Docs" nav bar entry:
>>
>>  Docs
>>    by Title
>>    by FC Release
>>    [FAQ]* 
>>
>>*This would be that extra structure I mentioned; not really a FAQ, but
>>an organization of questions that would link to the Title index.
> 
> 
> I.e., "by Title" expands to have a list of all documents by title in
> alpha order, and "by FC Release" expands to a short list of release
> numbers, which then expand to a set of document titles that are just
> part of that release?
> 
> One immediate problem I see is a maintenance nightmare.  As much as we
> would like to have a CMS, this is currently a manual process. 

FWIW, if you built the site with the DocBook Website DTD & 
stylesheets, the expanding ToC/navbar gets generated automatically. 
(I wrote the dbwebsite code for that turns/expands the icons.) And 
the really nice thing is that the source content of the site is - 
you guessed it - XML:)

Doubt that the resources exist presently for a site rebuild based on 
the DocBook Website package, but it may be worth investigating for 
the long term.

Sites built from this package are ubiquitous. (Dave Pawson's is a 
case in point, though he uses a horizontal ToC/navbar:)

A good example of the kind of navbar/ToC expansion you're talking 
about is at http://docbook.org. Click on the 'schema' link on the 
navbar to see how the ToC expands and the icons flip to provide some 
visual cues as to the present navigational context.

It wouldn't be too difficult to reproduce the current Fedora site 
look-n-feel by customizing the website stylesheets, if someone had 
the time & energy to do it.

Maintaining a website by hand-coding HTML is a painful process, but 
'sounds like it's the best we've got for now.

My $0.02,
Mark

> We need
> to focus on a simple structure that works, and let Google do the
> indexing for us. :)



-- 
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Mark Johnson                     <mjohnson at redhat.com>
OS Product Documentation
Engineering, Red Hat, Inc.       <http://www.redhat.com>
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