[TM4J-users] TM4J project web site & XTM (was RE: new member)

[Florian G. H. <f.g...@gm...>]

Hello.

[Kal]
| In terms of the website. I would really like the website to be designed
| with the concepts of topic maps in mind. I think it would be
| great to make
| use of topic maps to generate the site - even if it is initially static
| HTML pages, it would be good if the sources for those pages are linked
| together not only with normal <href> links, but also are
| organised within a
| topic map which could then be used to automatically insert extra
| navigation
| links into the HTML. However, that is getting a little to advanced too
| quickly.

Agreed. :-) I have suggested similar ideas to Thomas, and as far as I recall
I also once had a conversation with you about eventually using XTM as
something like a CMS for the web site, and bringing everything alive with
Tomcat, Velocity etc.

Nonetheless, I think what we need on the site for now is some useful
information about the project at hand, what its goals and who the people
involved are, and all that preferably in some sort of half-way spiffy
design. What might be a good starting point is the documentation already
available (dev guide etc.) -- I guess reinventing the wheel is always a bad
idea.

Actually generating the site from XTM exclusively is, I think, beyond our
possibilities at the moment. For now, we don't even have a set of XSLT
stylesheets we can use in order to transform everything into HTML. Thomas
and I are thinking about taking care of that eventually, but for now we have
to acknowledge that what we've got is quite little. Unless of course you,
Kal, talk to your friends at Ontopia and they give away the Omnigator for
free! :-)

So, perhaps it would be best if we concentrated on a standard-issue, static
HTML site for now, and take a more relaxed approach for developing The TM4J
Topic  Map (which we certainly need, but not just as a basis for a project
web site). The brainstorm idea is great for that. How about if we set aside
a directory in the CVS tree for that purpose? I guess it would make more
sense to actually present one's views and ideas as Topic Maps, rather than
having to use prose and e-mail.

And by the way, is this thread really where it's supposed to be? :-) I think
that since we are discussing things pertaining primarily to development
issues (OK, not Java code, but things that, for the most part, concern the
project developers), wouldn't it be a better idea to move this over to
tm4j-developers?

So much for my thoughts for the moment. :-)
-- Florian