Re: New LilyPond website

[Karlin High]

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