From maintainers-request at octave dot org Tue Jan 31 13:36:43 2006
Subject: Re: Octave web pages
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Quentin Spencer <qspencer at ieee dot org>
Cc: Bill Denney <denney at seas dot upenn dot edu>,         octave maintainers mailing list <maintainers@octave.org>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 14:36:31 -0500

On 31-Jan-2006, Bill Denney wrote:

| I don't think that I'll be able to take it over full time, but I could 
| definitely help.

On 31-Jan-2006, Quentin Spencer wrote:

| I have a little CSS experience and was recently thinking about proposing 
| an update to the Octave web pages using CSS. Like Bill, I don't have a 
| lot of time, but I could definitely share this responsibility with 
| others who are interested.

OK, you can find the source for the current pages here:

  http://www.octave.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/octave-www/

If you'd like to check them out, then use the same method as you would
use for the Octave sources from anonymous CVS, but check out the
module octave-www instead of octave.

The .in files are to be processed by M4.  The macros are defined in
macros.m4.  There is a Makefile to guide the generation of the actual
.html.  We can probably do away with the "text" version of the pages
that is generated, since that is not much different than the full
version of the pages, and all modern browsers support things like
tables now.

It would be nice to at least have a CSS definition for the section
headings, fonts, background and link colors, etc.

I don't know of a good way to automatically generate the page footer
with just HTML.  This is one of the primary reasons that I used M4, so
I could modify the page footer in one place and have it reliably
appear in a consistent manner on each page.  But if we don't often add
pages, this might not really be much of a problem.

The goal is to convert the .in files to HTML without cluttering them
up with a lot of 

  <table width="100%" cellpadding="3" border="0">
  <tr>
  <td align="left" bgcolor="#10a0ff">
  <font color="#ffffff"
	face="Helvetica">

goop (this is the sort of thing that the M4 macros produce, but that
we should be able to avoid with CSS).

For now, we can just discuss what to do, or you can send me patches.
Longer term, you should register as a user at savannah.gnu.org.  Then
login and follow the My Groups link and request to be included in the
Octave group and let me know that you have done this.  Then I'll
add you to the member list.

Thanks,

jwe