[Hudlug] created a web page

[Ben Fowler]

These are very important matters, and I mean to add some guidance on the wiki.

On 18/09/06, Anne Wilson <cannewilson at tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> On Monday 18 September 2006 09:19, Ben Fowler wrote:
> > ...
> > Part of the problem is writing the file back to the Web server, and I
> > guess that this is what the Geocities uploader does, and is something
> > that we need to duplicate (perhaps working hand in glove with an SCM
> > such as Subversion.
> >
> I simply made sure that all my pages were in one directory and all links were
> relational, then used gftp to upload to the web-space allotted by my ISP.

I think that that is the way to go.

BUT

When tutoring beginners, one needs to explain that HTTP and FTP are
different protocols; and

that ftp is a security hazard.

The first of these is a possibility, once one has got over the fact
that HTTP is 'one-way' (actually it isn't, there is a PUT as well as a
GET), but ftp is fiddly and there is a risk of losing all one's work,
and as you pointed out, there is a need to get each file in the right
place.

The second is not possible to do simultaneously - I have no answer to
the question of why we are using ftp if it not desirable.

I think that for simple web pages 'normal people' should use
database-backed mechanisms such as Mediawiki or Wordpress.

Obviously, anyone with the insight to see all stages of creating a web
site should be encouraged to do exactly as you have described, at
least part of the time. (Note that if several people want to work on
the same site, then unless you are using something like Subversion -
possibly even if you are - some quite elaborate steps may be needed to
avoid getting updates missed or over-written)

Nonetheless, I would like to have an Free Software solution for this,
particularly one that can be used to 'touch up' one or two pages. vim
in fact can do this as:

vim sftp://www.your.host.tld/index.htm

and I am happy to teach people to do this, but it is not really a
solution that would suit everyone.

> > The MS Word part of the solution - converting rich (formatted) text to
> > HTML or XML is fairly easy to do, but a fully integrated, seamless
> > solution is much harder.
> >
> I found that starting from a rich text file from a word processor needed a lot
> of cleaning up.  Creating the text directly into Composer was much cleaner,
> though that can be slimmed down too.  I especially liked the validation link.

Obviously it depends. My picture of a rich file is one with styles,
one heading and several paragraphs. All you are getting is the ability
to do simply formatting and and structure using your well-known gui
interface and export to several simple formats including HTML.

As soon as you start getting into complex  layouts or documents, this
may not be so satisfactory, but most programs will have a stab at it,
and there is no fundamental reason why the results should not be
satisfactory and indeed match what 'normal people' are looking for.

Ben