Re: How can I help?

[Curtis Hovey <sinzui cox net>]

On Sun, 2004-04-04 at 14:20, Martin Alderson wrote:
> I'd like to help the GNOME website. I can design graphics, design 
> layouts using semantic HTML and CSS and also I'm pretty flient at using 
> Apache + PHP and some variant of SQL (mySQL/SQLite).

There are a lot of easy tasks that you can do to get familiar with the
code.  Checkout the gnomeweb-wml and web-devel-2 modules.  The README in
gnomeweb-wml has an introduction to setting up you local environment to
make changes.  Please submit your patches (diffs) to bugzilla, (sending
and email to this list will also help get the word out to someone who
can commmit you patch).  If you have questions can catch someone in 
#webhackers on irc or send a message this list.

Easy fixes
             1. *.g.o sites (www, developer, foundation, etc) should
                reference their own content using relative-from-root
                URLs ('/arch/lang/'). Most of the pages have absolute
                URLs, which makes link testing awkward from your
                localhost.
             2. Pages must be valid XHTML transitional at the least. A
                lot of pages are not. Many pages were generated using
                tools that could not even make valid HTML 2.0. This is a
                huge, and somewhat monotonous task, but an important one
                that many people of varying skill can make a
                contribution. I did a find on the html in d.g.o and ran
                tidy (tidy.sf.net) to make this report of errors and
                warning. 
                http://members.cox.net/sinzui/validation-report.log
                I like tidy because once you have addressed the
                major errors, it can clean up the small errors in markup
                and even convert formating tags and attributes into
                styles.
             3. Convert iso-latin-1 to UTF-8. This is an awkward task. I
                cannot recommend a perfect tool. Tidy will output UTF-8
                if you set the flag to convert the page to XHTML, but I
                have had some problems with that. I have used
                native2ascii that ship with Java, and while it dutifully
                converts content, it will not change any character set
                declarations in the page.
             4. Flag abandoned and depreciated pages and documentation.
                We don't have a policy for this. I don't think we should
                be contributing to dead links be removing these pages.
                Instead, we need to update them to indicate they are
                abandoned or depreciated, and remove all site links to
                them. We may want to provide an index to old documents
                that might have some historical value.

-- 
__C U R T I S  C.  H O V E Y____________________
sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.