[SGVLUG] Call for webmasters

[David Lawyer]

On Mon, Jul 04, 2005 at 01:45:23PM -0700, Douglas Burton wrote:
> serross at ix.netcom.com wrote:
> 
> >I'm not 'the great designer of the west' either but, I do think we
> need to >get the interested people together and >decide exactly
> what we want in the site. There are different things that >can be
> done depending on the host box's >capabilities. Then we can code it
> so it runs to the W3C standards. Whether >XHTML/CSS2 are used or
> html,xml etc. you need the foundation defined >before the building
> is built.

I'm in favor of a very simple site using say html 3.2 and not using
any complex tags like the table tag.  For any tables, one can type the
table in plain text and then use the preserve tag so that the html
code contains something that looks like a table when viewed with a
text editor (vim, emacs).  ($vim site.html)

For my personal site, I use the linuxdoc markup (via vim) to create
html since linuxdoc is much simpler than html.  Then I run it thru
"tidy" to insure it's valid html.  If it isn't, tidy automatically
fixes it.  I wouldn't expect anyone else to learn linuxdoc (or any
other html-generating language).  But anyone who didn't know linuxdoc
could modify the html directly with a text editor (which would then
make the linuxdoc source non-current).

I think that the site should be simple enough so that anyone that
knows the rudiments of html can maintain it.  Also, I think that text
browsers like lynx should work OK with it.  But if someone wants to
use a certain cms, fine, but there should be a plan B using a simple
html so that it will be easy for someone else who is not familiar with
the cms.  to maintain the overall site.  The plan B site would exist as
a "backup".  Debian has 9 different cms packages and some are for
dynamic sites.  I think that any of these are overkill.  I understand
that once the cms is set up, then sometimes certain people can modify
it while browsing it, but then someone is still needed to reconfigure
the cms as conditions change.

Actually, the simplest site would just be plain text: site.txt but it
couldn't have any links to other pages or sites.  Thus I think a html
site would be better.  I could be wrong about this since I'm not
really familiar with the various cms systems but their capabilities
seem to be far beyond what SGVLUG needs.

			David Lawyer