I think someone may have misunderstood. I said the page was nice, colourful and well set out. I nowhere implied that women are less competent or knowledgeable.
The particular choice of colours and the obvious effort that went into thinking out the layout are strong indicators that the page was in fact constructed by a woman. And I was right. That is not to denigrate the work of the proportionally more male graphic designers that you know. My personal opinion is that it is possible, given the observed statistical correlation between well set out and colourful/visually appealing content and one particular gender, that our current, drab, bland, poorly set out documentation may be offputting to some members of that gender. So, if we aren't a private boys club.... Now, William commented that he doesn't want a colourful blinking web page. I interpreted this to mean that he wasn't asking for someone with the ability to create something aesthetically pleasing at this point, but that he was focused on making the website accessible to people speaking other languages. It was the purpose of my comment to clarify what he was asking the list, and he did that. The reason clarification was necessary is that his original request did not, in my opinion, make clear what it was about the website that he pointed out, that he liked so much, that he wanted emulated in SAGE's online presence. I wondered if having a website constructed by a women was on William's mind. Since it would be a good advertisement that SAGE is developed by men and women (as I realise that it is), that we are not a boys club and that we strongly encourage women to work on the development of SAGE. Pretty much, that is what I thought I was implying, and asking, i.e. was William specifically encouraging a woman to design the website documentation or for someone to design a colourful attractive website (whether male or female). For all I know, he may have already had someone in mind for the job. As you are mathematicians and CS type people, I expect to be understood when I make a comment such as the one I made, since to a mathematician at least, making a positive comment about a particular gender, does not imply something negative about that gender. Nor does a certain statistical correlation imply that any other possible correlation need exist. Actually, I still don't quite understand what the additional requirements were, beyond translations. William indicates in other comments that he is looking for a 15 minute quickstart for SAGE, but later on begins discussing translating existing documentation, which indicates that such a thing already exists. I started constructing such a thing last night, but abandoned it after a few hours. Describing for example, SAGE's use of precision in floating point computations, or the way it treats input/output symbols, vs indeterminates in polynomial and power series rings, is too complicated to include in a short presentation, yet appears to be critical information required to successfully operate SAGE at an elementary level. SAGE is inherently difficult to use in this regard, and thus trying to construct a 15 minute introduction is quite a difficult task as I found out after about four hours work. My apologies to anyone who thought I was being sexist. I think this is an American vs Australian vs European cultural difference actually. What is considered PC to say varies by culture, and what I said is largely considered PC in Australia. My apologies if I offended anyone. But my intentions were not as suggested. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
