On 12/3/2016 4:42 AM, Federico Bruni wrote: > John, you resisted more than I would have expected. I wonder if we'll > ever see "the best person for _this_ job".
And, I have been admiring John's patience and flexibility. He faced more resistance than I would have expected. Work on the website has an oil-and-water requirement - modernize the website by building on systems that are ancient by the web-development standards of today. In the 2 website-redesign discussions I've witnessed so far, I get the impression that the LilyPond community is a bit of a tough audience for web developers. I don't mean that in a bad way; it's just that people here are more typesetters than graphic designers. They may be used to spending lots of time and effort getting notation elements to look just so, making changes of mere millimeters. Are web developers used to having each and every choice of font and color scrutinized in such detail, while the discussion easily veers off into design philosophy? Maybe they are; I don't have much connection to the web-dev community. I like Urs Liska's idea of having a wiki or contributor guide entry for web developer work. Then future proposals for website work could get a response with a link to the requirements, as routinely as reminders about Minimal Working Examples. Although I don't have great experience with the LilyPond project, I'll propose something based on what I've gathered so far, maybe it could go here: http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/contributor/introduction-to-website-work "NOTICE: lilypond.org is not just a website. It is the product of a vast system of technical documentation. The documentation is written in a language called texinfo, which is standard for GNU projects. Texinfo allows generating different output formats from a single set of source files. This avoids needing different documents maintained for online information and printed manuals. Since there are currently 11 manuals for LilyPond, not including the translations, having a single-source documentation format is very important. Currently, LilyPond's texinfo output formats include HTML for the website, PDF for printing, and the info format used by UNIX-like operating systems. Keeping information on the website updated is automatic, as the web pages are generated when the documentation is built using the GNU make system. But it also means that the web development environment is unusual, and based on texinfo rather than HTML and CSS. "It is quite common for a skilled web developer to look at the lilypond.org website and reflexively propose a different system for maintaining it. Such proposals may have great merit when considering the website in isolation. However, the LilyPond project has limited resources for maintaining and translating its documentation, which makes up a major portion of the website. The idea of having to maintain the website apart from the documentation is unlikely to be supported by the developers and translators. Although there may be systems other than texinfo that would meet the needs for generating the documentation and website, there would need to be a compelling reason to make such a change. Simply doing the same thing in a different way is unlikely to be enough. This is a little like signage for highways and airports, where current fashions are largely disregarded in favor of long-established standards for presenting messages. Large-scale changes are rare and only done with great effort. "For any such large-scale structural change to be considered seriously, it would almost certainly require that its proposer have a considerable track record with maintaining LilyPond's documentation and show evidence of long-term commitment to the project. But, smaller changes to the formatting and appearance of the website are also needed, welcome, and much easier to have accepted. If you have never contributed to the LilyPond project before, and want to work on the website, a good starting point would be incremental changes to the CSS file." -- Karlin High Missouri, USA _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
