Testing:
- The website has been tested with Mozilla 1.1/ 1.0.1 and Opera
6.05/ 6.03 on Linux and Windows and it works fine; it should be W3C
compliant but this has not been checked yet.
Open to discussion:
Status information an every page.
Every page includes a timestamp in the following format:
<date created> / <date edited> (author)
Where <date created> is the date the page has been created; this
is not being modified; <date edited> is the date of the last
revision; this could be taken from the CVS or any other revisioning
system; currently this is being automatically changed when the page
has been touched; (author) is the editor's shortcut; it is linked to
entries on the
Project Team page.
Navigation elements.
Since everything in The Tark is about structured documents the
website should also be well structured.
On the left of every page there's a navigation box pointing to
the main areas of content; this is being created
automatically from the site's strcuture. When the site's content
grows, it's possible to include some kind of sub-navigation to the
pages on the 2nd, 3rd etc. level. A visual overview on the site's
structure is available on the
Site Map.
Every page contains a hierarchical path ("you are here"), where
the current page is located in the website; this is also known as
Yahoo! (or Open Directory) style navigation.
Other important elements for accessing information on the Tark
website are located on the top of every page; there are links
pointing to pages containing an alphabetical
Index, a
fulltext
Search, a complete
Table of Contents
(automatically created), and the
What's new?
page.
Tools for communication.
A living website lives from it's users, the community; the
community needs tools to communicate; a good way is IMHO an
annotation/ commentaing feature, available on every page. A good
example for this concept is Philip Greenspuns
photo.net which is based on the
Ars Digita Community System (which is Open Source but not
Free Software); a free port to Free Software is
Open ACS. An even better
alternative might be a Wiki where the user can actively
participate an the creation of the website; an example is
InfoAnarchy's Wiki.
Usage of proprietary technology.
Several features like the
Forum,
publicly accessible site stats, areas with restricted access,
showing who's online etc. are based on proprietary technology
(Microsoft's ASP) since this website is currently being hosted on
Microsoft's IIS; I understand that this is not wanted in the
Comglomerate project, even if the scripts are Free Software.
However, this website is just a design study to get things
started, and there are lots of alternatives based on PHP or similar
thechnologies out there; this website has been created just to show
some useful features, not to promote the usage of proprietary
technology.
CVS vs. CMS.
A website created from CVS will most probably not contain dynamic
content like the mentioned annotation feature, but it offers several
other advantages; if the site is being updated dynamically, e.g.
every coder will be able to update the website's content. On the
other hand, there are not much tools the community could use, the
coders have to waste time formatting documents etc.
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