mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Andreas Seidl <address@hidden>]

> It is painful for me to see that TeXmacs gets much less attention from
> the community than deserved. 
> 
> I am sure that part of the problem lies in the TeXmacs webpages. It's
> [..]
> It's about the frames, that old plague of webpages.

although i agree that there are good reasons against frames, i think they 
are not the main problem.

looking at the texmacs.org site with copyright marks from the year 2000,
the wiki which says "Current experimental release 1.0.1.2" or david's site
with many broken links, a new user can get the wrong impression.

furthermore, information is scattered around several places. there are FAQ 
on the website, but they are not maintained; a new user has to learn, that 
searching the mailing list archive is the substitute for the FAQ. same 
holds for bug- and wishlists. changing html pages with tables to php pages 
is certainly only a cosmetic action.

i would suggest that somebody decides that

- there is one central place (texmacs.org) from where one gets as directly
as possible to all available information. e.g. the menu on the texmacs.org
site misses a link to the wishlist, which is maintained at the wiki

- there shall be one place for each issue. either put a FAQ on the webpage 
or tell the reader to resort to the mailing list; either maintain a bug list, 
or don't (a 3-year old list is not an advertisement) 

- redundancy should be avoided. e.g. it makes no sence to have screenshots 
on texmacs.org and at the wiki, and the wiki should not be an additional 
way to access information from the texmacs site.  

> Now, as far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong), the server where
> TeXmacs is located (cri74.org) only supports PHP for this task, which is
> why I am asking (before further research) if anyone in this list with a
> minimum PHP knowledge could write the small needed assembling script.
> Just concatenate the menus to the body and give it the body name. 

i maintain the site for our group, and i use the following technique:  
pages are .php3 files, these files contain a couple of lines of php code
at the beginning and end to include more php code from files head.inc and
foot.inc and create the head and foot of the document. inbetween people 
write html as usual. furthermore there are some variables the user can set 
to define title, keywords, last modifier, etc. such a file looks like 
this:

<?
$TITLE="An example page";
$DESCRIPTION="show people";
$KEYWORDS="example, site, php";
include "http://yoursite/.../head.inc";
?>

<!-- content of document -->
<H1>A Heading</H1>
here i write the usual html...

<?
$LAST_UPDATED_BY="Andreas"; 
$EMAIL_OF_LAST_MODIFIER="address@hidden";
include "http://yoursite/.../foot.inc";;
?>

with this approach one can quickly update the design of many pages; and 
things like the last modification date are generated automatically.

if this suggestion is an option (is the server fast enough?), i can offer
to rewrite the pages accordingly, however this has to wait two weeks until
the current conference we are hosting is over and i have successfully 
moved to spain...

ciao. andreas.

FMI, Room 203                                 phone: +49 (0)851 509 3123
University of Passau                 http://www.fmi.uni-passau.de/~seidl