[Bravegw-web] Brave GNU World Website: My plans

[Nic Ferrier]

Before Christmas Georg asked me to state what I was planning to do to
help fix up BGW.

Early last year I offered my services for cleaning up BGW. I didn't
get round to completing the task because Georg and I lost contact for
a while (we're not sure how that happened).

Anyway, this email is an attempt to explain what I was planning to do.


The BGW website has one big problem that needs to be solved,
everything else flows from there. The big problem is that the data is
not properly structured markup.

That is, it's HTML, but it's very lose HTML and there is a lot of
style mixed up with the actual data.

What I planned to do was convert each existing issue of BGW into an
XML file containing nicely delimitted articles. 

To do this I wrote some XSLT scripts that passed out various bits of
BGW. These have now been lost but I can write them again.

The idea was to get these scripts to the point where they could
convert all the i18n versions of the pages. 

Then we would just run the scripts to create new XML data.

The new XML data would then be formatted with another XSLT script to
convert it into the BGW website as it looks right now.


The ongoing process would then be streamlined:

- Someone writes BGW in an XML format and saves it in the CVS.

- The XML is also submited to the translators. 

- The translators drop their translated versions of the XML onto the
  CVS as well.

- a daily build causes the BGW website to be built from whatever files
  are available.



Since there are more people who want to help now I'd like to know if
everybody agrees that this is a sensible path to take.


If they do then I will soon start work on making the conversion XSLT
scripts again.

Once I've got a script I could use some help testing everything with
it.

Once we've got the data someone else could take it from there and
build the rest. Or we could work together.

But perhaps the right thing to do is get the data converted first.


-- 
Nic Ferrier
http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk