From: dpg@cs.nott.ac.uk (Dave `geek' Gymer)
Newsgroups: alt.galactic-guide
Subject: Re: HyperTextish stuff
Date: 11 Nov 92 12:09:10 GMT
Reply-To: dpg@cs.nott.ac.uk (`Grave' Dave `geek' Gymer)
Organization: Association of Slack Producing Geeks

In article <1992Nov9.041808.2215@primerd.prime.com> jasonp@sunbabe.Prime.COM (Jason Pascucci) writes:
>Has anybody looked into the (albeit pretty shoddy) hypertext-type
>widgets that are around, like gopher, or WWW? They are more designed 
>for distribution of data (another problem we need to solve)...hence the 
>fairly sucky interface.

Yup.  Since I'm doing TUG! as a serious project (my final year
project, to be precise), I've taken a look at some of the other
hypertext-type stuff.  The way I'm writing TUG! 2, it should be
possible for guide entries and complete guides to be served over a
network to the browser program with relatively few changes to the TUG!
2 local browser.  I may attempt to implement such a scheme if I have
time (but I probably won't).

>I'm not volenteering, I don't have the time right now, but it's 
>something someone, perhaps the author of the Unix Guide tools, should 
>consider.

As I've just said, since this is a serious project (TUG! 2, that is),
I'm looking at rather a lot of possible `fancy extras' for TUG! 2 to
have to make it more impressive (and hence hopefully push my marks
up :-).

>I'd (speaking as a potential contributer, and with my software
>archicture hat on) really like two things (neither of these programs give 
>it to you directly, but it's not difficult to hack in): a X GUI interface, 
>with keyboard accelerators and indexing, and a way to simply and quickly add 
>entries and ship them off to the appropriate place.

If I get time, I will be adding an X front end to TUG! 2, especially
now that I've got X11R5 up on my 386; but even if I don't, the
interface to the actual display code should be clean enough for
someone with more Xperience than me to add one.

As for indexing, I don't get what you're after here; TUG! 0.22 allowed
you to browse the entry index, and TG! for DOS also allows access to
the index (I can't remember exactly how; it's been a while since I
looked at TG! for DOS in any great depth).

In terms of writing entries, I don't think there is very much help a
program can give you, although I'll probably put a feature in TUG! 2
which creates a skeleton entry, invokes an editor, then mails it to a
set address (of a guide editor).  If someone _really_ wants to be
clever, they could write an emacs mode to edit guide entries... my
emacs lisp isn't up to it!  Come to think of it, it should be possible
to write a whole browser in emacs lisp... any volunteers?  :-)

>I feel that if this 
>happens, and you start making the correct annoucements to the net that 
>this exists, you will get the flood of articles you want for this project. 
>If you make it easy to do, plug-n-play...hell, provide a self-contained
>binary directory for lots of platforms for the alternately clued, you'll 
>get the strong response you want. But don't do it half-way, it will be 
>another abortive attempt, which won't lend credibility to the
>effort. 

So you think the lack of a decent browser is causing the shortage of
articles that we seem to be suffering?  I doubt that very much; it's
so easy to read articles with nothing more than less (pun intended)
that I don't see why that should stop people.

As for binary distributions, I hope you're not suggesting that TUG! 2
should be distributed in binary form; apart from anything else, this
is likely to encourage people to break the terms of the license (the
GNU GPL), and in any case, for a UNIX browser you would have to
compile a truly phenominal number of TUG!s on different machines.  It
would also discourage people from tinkering with the source, improving
it, and fixing bugs.  If you're worried about installation, one of my
major aims for TUG! 2 is an automated configuration scheme, based on
GNU Autoconf, which should make compiling it a breeze.

In any case, I think most people have access to a DOS box, to at least
browse the guide until TUG! 2 hits the streets in released form.

-- 
`Grave' Dave Gymer | Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which
42 St Mary's Park  | can be adequately explained by stupidity." Finagle's
Louth, Lincs       | Law: "The perversity of the universe tends towards a
LN11 0EF, England  | maximum." (Quoted from the jargon file. Thanks ESR!)
Newsgroups: alt.galactic-guide