Hi, I spent much of today on a bit of Javascript to guide a user through selecting the right image for his or her use case; the idea being that we'd ask them a few questions, and then say "this is the image you'll need to download if you want to install Debian like that".
A proof of concept is up at http://latin.grep.be/~wouter/debian-www/releases/stable/debian-installer/ If people like this, it will require some more work before it can go live. In particular: - It currently has no visual appeal. Someone with better graphical design skills than myself will have to fix that. - After asking questions, it tells you 'this is what you asked for', but it doesn't actually give you the URL, because that part hasn't been implemented yet. - There is a button "disable this, give me the full list". Once you click on it, it's gone and there's no way to get it back (other than a page refresh). This may not be ideal. - There may be a need to improve some of the language in the questions. - This adds two files, a .js file and a .json file. The first contains the logic of showing the buttons etc and should not need to be localized (although there are some direct strings currently, and they will need to be moved elsewhere); the second contains the questions that should be asked and what their effect should be. It may be necessary to either generate the second in such a way that it can be localized, or update my makefile rule so that the localized .json files are stored and copied from the right language-specific directory. I decided not to spend too much time on that now though, since I thought it would make more sense to show what I've got so far and ask for people's thoughts. So. Thoughts? Does this look like something useful? Should I spend more time on finishing it up and possibly adding it to the website proper? Thanks, -- Could you people please use IRC like normal people?!? -- Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, trying to quiet down the buzz in the DebConf 2008 Hacklab
