At Tue, 03 Jan 2006 13:30:44 +0000, Alex Hudson wrote:

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 12:58 +0000, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:

...

Gnash is a new GNU project to build a media player that's compatible with Macromedia "Shockwave Flash" standards and plays common ".swf" files. Gnash will work both as a standalone application, and as a browser plugin (initially for Firefox).

Sorry for being the New Years Sourpuss, but...

I'm not sure if people are noticing (probably, they are), but more and more software (Gnash included) is becoming OpenGL reliant.

One of the biggest missing pieces in the free software desktop will increasingly become good OpenGL drivers. I have a Radeon 9200SE, which has a great free driver, and plays bzflag wonderfully. My Thinkpad has a Radeon Mobility 9000 (R250), which will hopefully run well with the upcoming r300 driver. But, these are both fairly crappy chipsets in comparison to the state of the art, and I'm to understand that beyond the r300 driver we're not going to get squat.

Obviously, most people know this already, but it's surely getting more serious over time. OpenGL has to be the way to go, but if all your apps are GL (I don't know the names of all these things, but font rendering strikes me as an obvious beneficiary, there is a GL mozilla you can try, GNOME has some measure of GL support in Gtk+ already, etc. etc.) and you only have a MESA software renderer, that's going to be an awfully slow desktop :(

I wish there were some clear solution to this issue....

I hope this project will succeed:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/5743

Jeroen Dekkers

Am Tuesday, dem 03. Jan 2006 schrieb Alfred M. Szmidt:

I hope this project will succeed:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/5743

Sadly, the Open Graphics Project is a very short term solution. We cannot expect people to go out of their way and buy specialised hardware for their computers. Nor can we expect ourselfs to build completely free hardware for each and every type of device that is out there. Software is so much nicer in this regard...

You are right with that, but...

We _must_ presure big companies to release their specs, so that all users of computers can have the freedom that they deserve.

Nobody will open the specs, until anybody starts with it... If the Open Graphics Project has success, if there is a market for it, it will be a presure to other companies, because they don't want to lose that part of the market. So let's hope it will be a success. Let's make it a succes. It could be a door opener...

Am Tuesday, dem 03. Jan 2006 schrieb Alfred M. Szmidt:

...

We _must_ presure big companies to release their specs, so that all users of computers can have the freedom that they deserve.

Nobody will open the specs, until anybody starts with it...

Which is why we as users, must bitch and moan loudly. Many companies already release their specs for drivers. Some don't, these should be painted in the darkest colour possible until they do what is morally sound. ATI used to release the graphic card specifications for example...

But AFAIK nobody released specifications for 3D hardware acceleration yet. That is, what I meant with "anybody has to start with it".

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 16:55 +0000, Sam Liddicott wrote:

But you can't tell everyone whose GNU flash animations are slow: tough! you should get an open-gl graphics card, can you? Is hardware opengl really going to be a requirement to play flash animations?

It's pretty much going to be a requirement full-stop. The vast, vast majority of PCs out there have some form of 3D support built into them, and most desktops will need it in some form in the next few years.

We already rely on some form of hardware acceleration I think; a non-accelerated X server is very slow. What we're talking about is a change from using of 2D functions (e.g., blitting) to 3D (e.g., compositing).

As an example of the kind of development that needs 3D hardware acceleration:

http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6498

3D-type operations are really useful for doing things like drawing SVG objects (a standardised alternative to Flash), fonts, but it also makes the application a lot more consistent cross-platform apparently.

Of course, you don't need 3D hardware in order to do that kind of drawing, but it's very slow without use of it :( There is already a version of Mozilla that requires GL, and various toolkits, font rendering systems, etc. There is a GL X server in heavy development, and obviously most games but also many multimedia programs use GL for video. You just can't run a fully GL desktop off a software runtime, and it looks like everyone is going GL...

Cheers,

Alex.

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 19:13 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:

Alex Hudson home@alexhudson.com

...

As an example of the kind of development that needs 3D hardware acceleration: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6498

Why are they interested in Cairo rather than any 2d-friendly vector library? Can someone translate that page for non-graphics-fans?

I wouldn't rate myself a graphics fan, but I'll try - I did UI & OpenGL in a former life...

So - why Cairo. Well, Cairo *is* 2D-friendly - it's an API for drawing 2D stuff, like lines, polygons, that kind of thing. But there's "2D" and there's "2D".

"Old" 2D hardware did memory-interesting operations: moving blocks of memory around at high speed (often called 'sprites') for example is very common and very useful (a nice smooth mouse pointer). It may also do things like filling areas quickly (usually rectangles), and other assorted stuff. But, to call this "2D hardware" is really missing the point - it's acceleration of memory operations that happen to be useful for bitmaps.

Now, drawing complex lines and things is as much rasterisation as drawing 3D objects - in fact, it's basically the same problem, just with the Z-dimension removed.

Cairo is this 'high level 2D' API, which does things in a nicer, more abstract 'lines and curves' way, but this is a lot more graphics work than old cards are used to. If you think of 2D being a simplification of the 3D mathematics (which is basically is), you can think of 2D being less work than 3D, but still quite complex (the basic mixing of pixel colours where things overlap still happens, taking care of transparency, that kind of thing). That kind of view is completely different to the "memory buffers" view of older cards.

As an example, look at drawings in OpenOffice.org with Cairo turned on:

http://primates.ximian.com/~michael/ooo-cairo.png

You can see the polygons on the page have smooth edges. That's what Cairo does; it's a high-quality 2D library. It's also output-neutral: the Mozilla people have had trouble generating pages for printing since, well, years ago, and Cairo nicely solves part of the issue. And this is all in software, none of this requires 3D anything.

So, where does GL come in? High-quality 2D is a substantial amount of work, and it just so happens that OpenGL will happily do 2D operations for you. GL is a convenient way of speeding up Cairo drawing operations, by offloading the drawing to the graphics card. This is what this "Glitz" thing is - it's Cairo running on GL, and running pretty fast compared to the all-software version.

There are alternatives to GL, such as:

http://www.khronos.org/openvg/

(which is an interesting demonstration of the stuff you need to do for modern 2D displays in its own right). But, they're even less suitable.

Is everyone going GL because they are ignorant or just willing to ignore what looks like a new Java Trap problem to get the benefits?

Almost certainly the latter, although it's hard to see how you could get the benefits (and there are benefits) in any other way, so it's not quite the same.

The benefits aren't just eye-candy. I think we've all seen PDF files load in front of our eyes because there is so much stuff on the page; a GL-accelerated PDF reader would render it instantaneously. Being able to have a resolution-independent display (so that it can be smoothly zoomed, useful if you have poor eyesight) needs that acceleration. Being able to drive a high-resolution display would almost certainly need it, and being able to support real-time vector graphics (e.g., SVG icons, themes, etc.) across a whole desktop probably needs it.

What I'm trying to get across is that this isn't developers wanting to spin and rotate windows on three axes, there are lots of 2D reasons for wanting a GL-based desktop. It makes the display much higher quality, faster, and takes load off the main CPU which ends up doing much less drawing. People want to leave the world of bitmaps and memory shunting behind, and move to a wholly vector-art based system.

What is the scale of this problem? A few cards have been mentioned, but the messages make it sound like they're a small minority of 3d hardware on sale today. Are there similar sites to r300.sf.net for other manufacturers, or any overview site?

No, not really, it's a mess.

R300 and R200 (the two best drivers, I think) are for a limited range of older Radeon cards (basically, anything without an X at the start of the model number). I believe there are some drivers for an Intel chipset, and a few for some older cards. Nothing nVidia is available, and nothing modern ATI.

Basically, anything which supports "modern" 3D is not available in a free software driver. In terms of "modern" features, I'm talking about things like vertex shaders - small programs that software downloads onto the 3D card in order to make them do incredible things. This is how complex the interfaces with these cards has become.

Cheers,

Alex.

On Sun, 2006-01-08 at 10:43 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:

Thanks for the explanations. So, if I understand correctly, Cairo is in a similar space to Display PostScript and Display PDF, but uses GL to draw and use the graphics processor as much as possible.

Yeah, you're basically spot-on, although Cairo tends to be used with software renderers at the moment (the GL stuff is newer, and where people want to go with it).

...

...

[...] Are there similar sites to r300.sf.net for other manufacturers, or any overview site?

No, not really, it's a mess. [...]

Are others willing to help create one? I think I could program it fairly quickly.

I think others have tried; but I guess previous efforts have tried to be a general db on all hardware. A specific graphics hw site could work, I don't think it's really been tried.

The large issue is the model name -> hardware mapping; it's basically a many-to-many relation (a given model could have a number of different chips inside; and vice-versa - it's basically a silicon yield thing). E.g., the Radeon naming system: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon - check out the X series in particular (as chips as more expensive to produce, and yield goes down, there is a tendency to use high-performance devices in cheap hardware when the device has to be clocked down/is partially faulty in some way, if you see what I mean). Different chips in the same model are not always operable by the same driver.

The other issue is the non-brand boards; you buy a board with ATi/NV chips or whatever, but it's made by some Taiwanese manufacturer or something. Though the chips are the same, they are sometimes wired up in different ways - doesn't usually affect the 3D support per se, but can mean that you can't run the card in certain configurations (eg., dual head, TV out, DVI support or other hardware-y features) with standard free software drivers. Sometimes you just need to fix the PCI ID db, sometimes it's more work are requires a patch to the driver (as my Radeon 9200 SE needed to get DVI support).

It probably isn't worth trying to capture all those permutations though; probably worth concentrating on capturing the basic 3D support and (what would be good would be) a performance metric. I'm sure plenty of people out there would be willing to help, me included.

Cheers,

Alex.

On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 05:37:12PM +0000, Alex Hudson wrote:

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 16:55 +0000, Sam Liddicott wrote:

...

Is hardware opengl really going to be a requirement to play flash animations?

From the flash movies I have seen, I consider it technically possible to write a player that is reasonable fast in software with low hardware requirements. But, I do agree with Alex that OpenGL will become a requirement soon. The reasons are practical: Everybody else goes this way, there will be more 3D card and bettere graphic libraries for it. So why do a really optimised software renderer if you have the libraries and hardware at hand anyway.

And in the end: flash movies will use the capabilities and thus raising the requirements.

It's pretty much going to be a requirement full-stop. The vast, vast majority of PCs out there have some form of 3D support built into them, and most desktops will need it in some form in the next few years.

3D-type operations are really useful for doing things like drawing SVG objects (a standardised alternative to Flash), fonts, but it also makes the application a lot more consistent cross-platform apparently.

Does SVG have all the features regarding animation and related effects, like sound?

Again for all the flash movies out there, I hope that Gnash will succeed. There have been a few attempts before to create Free Software flash players, but have not made it over the hill of wider acceptance.

Bernhard

On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 11:48:53AM +0000, Alex Hudson wrote:

On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 12:43 +0100, Bernhard Reiter wrote:

...

...

3D-type operations are really useful for doing things like drawing SVG objects (a standardised alternative to Flash), fonts, but it also makes the application a lot more consistent cross-platform apparently.

Does SVG have all the features regarding animation and related effects, like sound?

Oh yeah. SVG even defines a network socket layer. Nobody supports the full SVG spec. as far as I know, though (e.g., Firefox 1.5 supports SVG, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't do animation yet - though I think you can fake it with scripting).

I'm ignorant about SVG, are you talking about javascript or does it have a SVG-specific scripting language ? We choosed SWF for scripting capabilities, mainly, which none of the available free player support...

...

Again for all the flash movies out there, I hope that Gnash will succeed. There have been a few attempts before to create Free Software flash players, but have not made it over the hill of wider acceptance.

I agree. I don't think a GL requirement is to Gnash's detriment; rather, I think it will allow them to concentrate on understanding the file format than rewriting primitive graphics operations.

I think the best approach would be being modular and accept both GL libraries and 2d libraries. This could be a compile-time define to avoid overhead, but it IMHO it is worth taking old hardware in consideration (hardware waste is getting a problem)

--strk;

/"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign \ / Respect for low technology. X Keep e-mail messages readable by any computer system. / \ Keep it ASCII.

On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 01:56:10PM +0000, Alex Hudson wrote:

The problem is that the non-hardware accelerated libraries are not sufficiently fast to keep up with 3D hardware, no matter what age it is (my old-ish Radeon 9200SE blows away my 2200+ Athlon XP, for example).

In theory, you can use software rendering. In practice, it's just not quick enough.

I have seen working code that render very fast in software, the problem is, that it needs to be optimised for a specific task, so it does not help libraries much that are generic. So the structure

a) hardware -- b) generic library -- c) flash player

does not allow a lot flash specifica optimisations, in contrast to

a) hardware -- c) flash player

but there you need to to the coding within c).

Bernhard

On 03-Jan-2006, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:

I wish there were some clear solution to this issue....

There is, simply not supporting companies that refuse to give specifications to their hardware, and nagging them to release these specs.

Which is not a solution unless everyone else does the same.

The OpenBSD community has been very sucessfull in this regard, and it is a bit of a shame that the GNU project, the FSF and FSFE have been a bit lacking.

How can "the GNU project, the FSF and FSFE" do more in the "not supporting [proprietary 3D hardware companies]" regard? AFAIK, none of them "support" those companies already. Is there something else "lacking"? If so, you haven't stated it.

As for Linux, that's certainly a sore spot. Many kernel developers are happy dealing with the devil. Fortunately, there are also many like Greg Kroah-Hartman:

URL:http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html URL:http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2005-October/011317.html URL:http://www.kroah.com/log/2005/11/21/

[Alfred, please attribute quoted material; also, please don't send me two copies, I'm subscribed to the list. My Mail-Followup-To header field shows this.]

On 04-Jan-2006, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:

I'm trying to see what point Gre Kroah-Hartman is trying argue, he seems to be on one hand arguing against a stable internal Linux driver interface

That, and actively promoting a vigorously changing ABI to make it more difficult to maintain proprietary drivers. His argument is that if you want your driver to be easily maintained, submit it for inclusion in the kernel so the whole community can maintain it as GPL code.

but on the other hand, excluding non-free drivers from Linux; which are already illegal (the only problem is enforcing the copyright for Linux, which is more or less impossible).

Why is that "more or less impossible"? Any party who breaches copyright on Linux code becomes vulnerable to a suit from any of the copyright holders in that code. This sometimes results in visible suits:

URL:http://news.com.com/Fortinet+settles+GPL+violation+suit/2100-7344_3-5684880.html

Much more often though, if we are to believe FSF's counsel Eben Moglen, the mere opening of discussions on GPL violation is enough to make the problem quitely disappear by having the code released (or, less often, stop being distributed).

Having a (maybe even just a partial) stable interface for drivers, is immensly useful

As discussed on Greg's site, a stable driver *API* is necessary and useful; a stable driver *ABI* is far too rigid, and of benefit mostly to proprietary out-of-tree kernel drivers.

It is also easy to make it impossible for non-free drivers to abuse this for their own evil purposes, just GPL it, and collect copyright assignment then serve papers to companies/people who violate the GNU GPL license.

I'm not sure how this fits with your "enforcing the copyright for Linux... is more or less impossible" statement.

I think that (from a very brief reading of the URL's you posted, thanks for that by the way) Greg Kroah-Hartman is trying to do a good thing, but doing it in the wrong place. Linux is after all not the only free kernel out there...

It's by far the one free kernel the hardware vendors want in on, though, and thus an excellent point to apply pressure on them.

"Alfred M. Szmidt" ams@gnu.org

You are attributed in the header, and you should make your client filter duplicate emails. I have no intention of changing anything, sorry.

I'd second the view on the duplicates. Mail-Followup-To is non-standard and conceptually broken. I'd rather clients asked for the right target when a List-Post header is supplied.

However, that "attribution" in the header is in a field that isn't commonly displayed by most GNU mail clients AFAICT. Please include proper attribution in the message, as suggested in RFC 1855.

However, that "attribution" in the header is in a field that isn't commonly displayed by most GNU mail clients AFAICT.

All mail clients show the To headers, so proper attribution is already done.

Please include proper attribution in the message, as suggested in RFC 1855.

I really dislike it when people quote RFC's which first of all are guidelines, secondly, they themself do not folllow, thirdly, the person who they are lecturing is already following the part that they are requesting to be followed.

From RFC 1855:

* Limit line length to fewer than 65 characters and end a line with a carriage return. * Mail should have a subject heading which reflects the content of the message.

So please, lets stop this useless side-thread and get back to the topic at hand; whatever it was...

|| On Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:31:39 +0100 || "Alfred M. Szmidt" ams@gnu.org wrote:

ams> How can "the GNU project, the FSF and FSFE" do more in the ams> "not supporting [proprietary 3D hardware companies]" regard? ams> AFAIK, none of them "support" those companies already. Is ams> there something else "lacking"? If so, you haven't stated it.

ams> I did state it, "nagging".

On a general basis, both as an organisation and as individuals, we tend to keep nagging hardware vendors permanently. Indeed it appears that the Brave GNU World was dropped from the UK Linux-Magazine also because readers complained that I was nagging too much -- at least that is what the comments of the editor seemed to imply.

So I'm not sure that more nagging will help, rather than have the opposite effect of alienating people to our valid points.

What I believe we *do* need is more people to carry on and support this message; which is why we created the Fellowship of FSFE [1] as a means of _making support visible in a way that shows dedication_ to help show that our nagging is not just nagging, after all, but voicing valid points.

Regards, Georg

[1] http://www.fsfe.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

Hi,

Alfred M. Szmidt schrieb:

On a general basis, both as an organisation and as individuals, we tend to keep nagging hardware vendors permanently. Indeed it appears that the Brave GNU World was dropped from the UK Linux-Magazine also because readers complained that I was nagging too much -- at least that is what the comments of the editor seemed to imply.

Negative comments tend to cloud the positive ones, so here is a postive one: I want Brave GNU World back!!! It was one of the few things I enjoy reading, and have been wondering what the heck happened to it.

I wanted to direct you to the online issues at http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/ but then I realised that only issues until 2004 are available there. What happened?

Best wishes Michael

- -- Protect your freedom - become a fellow of the FSF Europe http://www.fsfe.org/en

...

[ Brave GNU World's disapperance ]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 12:06:09PM +0100, Georg C. F. Greve wrote:

Essentially the web volunteers got tired after a few years and disappeared over night while new volunteers never really got into the job and so the publication cycle broke down.

What is the `web volunteers's' job? Putting your (and others's) translated articles online?

Doesn't the GNU project / the FSF have people who would like to contribute to the effort bringing in their not-directly-coding-related skills?

Regards, Thomas

On Monday 09 January 2006 15:30, Georg C. F. Greve wrote:

I have found myself thinking that a CMS (Drupal? Typo3?) or maybe a Blogging Software (Wordpress?) with review and workgroup management and authorisation capabilites, as well as the possibility to add modules like automatically emailing certain language versions to people who subscribed to them might be a good idea.

I am currently doing an internship as a typo3 extension hacker at a local web design company and I would love to set up a typo3 site for this purpose... Would be a good opportunity to learn about the workflow functions of typo3, which I haven't used yet. I could even ask my boss if I can use some of my time working for him for this project...

However I could need a hand on doing the HTML template (design sucks) and maybe need some space (I could ask Thomas if we can use the deshalbfrei.org server but the domain name might be confusing for people who don't understand German).

regards, Chris

On Tuesday 10 January 2006 12:54, Sam Liddicott wrote:

Typo3 is good.

In this case I suggest use of Campsite http://www.campware.org/

I will have a look at campsite later; but can you give us an overview of what you think are the benefits over typo3? Bjoern Schiessle contacted me via private mail and offered his help so I think we can get a running site up... Here's what I think is needed:

1) Port the old design to a Content Management system 2) Implement a new, more direct workflow system. Gregor: What do you think is the best? It could be quite similar to the old system; we just woulnd't need the "web volunteers" any more as you could do the publishing yourself easily using the CMS... 3) Include the older issues (easy enough once the CMS is running) 4) (Mabye) implement a new design

Any comments?

Chris

On Tuesday 10 January 2006 22:46, Guillaume Lenoir wrote:

I don't know enough about CMS to debat on which is the best, but Georg gave a pretty good (even if general) view of what's needed and I trust the "ones who know" to choose and get it up right. I can only emphasize the need for an ease to edit, but also to translate the content. As Christoph, I'd like to read about the compared benefits of proposed CMS.

I have had a look at the requirements and I think the Serendipity weblog software does the job very nicely (and easily - it is much faster to install and configure than a typo3 site). I have put online an example with Issue #1 in English and German. Be aware that this is a 20-minute-copy-and-paste solution withouth any formatting/linking and it uses the Serendipity standard design. But it shows of s9y's mulitilingual and archiving features. Comments are welcome: http://tanja.delmonico.de/bravegw/ If Georg likes it and there are no other complaints, we could build a custom s9y design (template) and start the work of properly including the old issues...

Is there a place I can download untranslated English texts to start working on the French version ? My German is not good enough to do the job though.

You can find the Englisch versions at http://brave-gnu-world.org/

chris

...

Is there a place I can download untranslated English texts to start working on the French version ? My German is not good enough to do the job though.

You can find the Englisch versions at http://brave-gnu-world.org/

I was talking about untranslated english issues, and I didn't find an english version there that wasn't already translated in french.

Le lundi 09 janvier 2006 à 15:40 +0100, Georg C. F. Greve a écrit :

|| On Sat, 7 Jan 2006 14:13:46 +0100 || "Alain M. Lafon" preek@stud.uni-stuttgart.de wrote:

aml> I'm a native german speaker, too, but I'd like to help by doing aml> a "rough" translation - after I've finished people may judge aml> wheter it is worth to be read by others. Are we talking about aml> 8-12 issues here?

The last translated issue is #59.

Last weekend I wrote issue #82.

So we are talking 23 issues overall... quite a bit of work. It seems too much for any single person, but maybe together we can get them translated.

Are there any English I could start putting into French (issues 61-82) and where ?

Gdl.

Hi :)

For the people still interested in the issue: I have just started to work on a clean template based on the current .html file, which is a) not valid XHTML b) not very acessible (e.g. tables instead of lists, no accesskeys)

I haven't mentioned this before, but I think acessibility is a *very* important matter to *all* GNU homepages. We want everyone to be able to get information about free software, this includes persons with certain disabilities. I'm not an expert on acessible web pages yet, but that's one of the things I want to learn about more in the future.

After I finished my work on the new template, it is time to decide on a CMS. Personally, I'm still unsure between Serendipity and Typo3. Serendipity will be the simpler solution for this specific task, but Typo3 is way more flexible. E.g. maybe there will be other GNU homepages that need a CMS too in future, so we could just add them to the Typo3-Installation - typo3 can handle thousand of pages, each with different HTML templates, multiple languages, and everything else you could think of. Additionally, Typo3 is good to build accessible web pages (there was a German award for acessible sites called "BIENE" and IIRC three of ten winning sites were run by Typo3).

OK, that for now, I'm back to clean up the template file.

regards, Chris

On Wednesday 25 January 2006 23:21, Bjoern Schiessle wrote:

About Serendipity, what about the other bravegw sides beside the Column? As far as i can see they doesn't really fit into a weblog software. Also i have some concerns about the 3th party language plugin and for example what happens if we would need a language not available by default. Basically i share some concerns about a CMS with Bernhard Reiter [0] after i have played with some of them [1].

You're right. The other pages would need another third-party plugin. So just dump s9y, that was a dirty hack ;)

About a script vs. CMS the script might be the faster solution for one site. However I think a good CMS solution could host some more GNU sites... Looking at gnu.org, it must be a bunch of work to maintain the site...

Maybe you can contact me privately so you can show me your scripts and I can show you a Typo3 site so we can compare our solutions? :)

chris

On Thursday 26 January 2006 14:22, MJ Ray wrote:

http://www.optaros.com/wp/wp_5_cms_report.html

Interesting report :) However (while I still haven't read it in total) I don't know why they judge typo3-community as "average", it's the best CMS community I've seen out there :) Very active mailing lists, nice IRC channel plus several forums on the net.

In general, I share the preference for xhtml+css generation when possible. If it's good xml, it's a good exit safeguard.

We sure all do ;) But this can be done via bjoerns scripts as well as via typo3. To give you guys an impression of how powerful typo3 is, here is a test-version [1]. This site was done yesterday in not much more then four hours including: * Typo3 installation * Writing HTML/CSS template * Integrating it to typo3 * multilanguage-versions with nice flagged language selector (could be turned to the old-fashioned text-links by setting one option, but I kinda liked it ;)) * two-level accessible menu (lists instead of table! tables are evil!) * search-engine friendly links (well, partly - neet to get the language thing in there but that isn't going to be a problem)

Now all you need to do is some copy&paste and you can use the old data with the links and formatting (only had to replace the "column@gnu.org" to fix XHTML validity) - I have done it to the "Introduction" and three translations (couldn't do japanese translation as I don't see how I can make my browser output JP characters ^^).

And this installation is a clean, very extensible solution. If in some months we think another GNU subpage could profit from a CMS, we could just port it in there with very few efforts.

So what are the advantages of using a specialized script as Bjoern plans to do? I see: * Less server load (no script on the webserver) * better security (again: no scripts on the server) * any more?

Advantages I see in my approach: * Easily extensible to other pages because it only uses standard techniques and is not specialized on the sepcific task of braveGW. * can have builtin search functionality * has builtin user-management, logging/versioning (diffs) and workflow features if needed * is very well tested. while I trust your script-hacking expertise, bjoern, experience teaches us that you *will* encounter bugs. typo3 runs tens of thousands of websites very reliable [2] * content is absolutely separated from design -- new "corporate identity" for GNU? no problem! just develop the new template, remap it, and use the old content! * It has some accessibility extensions that can generate for example accesskeys and <dfn> tags for the menus or <ABBRV> tags which can help people with disabilities that can't use a mouse or need a screenreader.

regards, Chris

[1] http://tanja.delmonico.de/typo3/ (might be down sometimes and its very slow - 266MHz and a 14kbps upstream ;)) [2] see some of them here: http://typo3.com/Customers.1229.0.html

On Thursday 26 January 2006 15:49, MJ Ray wrote:

Christoph Neuroth christoph@deshalbfrei.org [...] I can't remember: does the workflow support offline working?

Well you can write a issue offline and then copy&paste it when you're online ;) By workflow I mean things like "Person X is allowed to create new pages, but they have to be checked by person Y before being published".

Can you fix the CSS errors and colour warnings, please? http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://tanja.delmonico.de/ typo3/

Thanks for the hint - I fixed the errors , but are you sure this thing works correctly? See this warning: Zeile : 44 (Level : 1) Sie haben keine Hintergrundfarbe zu der Vordergrundfarbe angegeben : .tx-srlanguagemenu-pi1 .CUR a (German for no background color)...

...and the corresponding CSS: .tx-srlanguagemenu-pi1 .CUR a { background-color: transparent; color: #35006d; text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; } I see background-color and color... The validtor doesn't see? (Well it's not my CSS it's inserted by the language selector. I guess we could just remove all color things there as we don't need them anyway. The language selection might need some customization if it shall fit the old layout anyway, but for now I only wanted to show off that it works :)

chris

Christoph Neuroth wrote:

On Tuesday 10 January 2006 12:54, Sam Liddicott wrote:

...

Typo3 is good.

In this case I suggest use of Campsite http://www.campware.org/

I will have a look at campsite later; but can you give us an overview of what you think are the benefits over typo3?

Something working soonest is always best, so maybe typo3. I'm, reviewing campsite now for a project and it is the first CMS that has excited me for a long time,

Unlike typo3 it is not a website publishing system but a publication publishing system, based around any number of publicatoins with any number of editions and any number of articles in any numvber of languages with UTF8 characterset support from the grund up. The workflow clearly delineates the different roles of publication from submission, editing, review and publication. It does one job and does it well.

I can set up campsite in 10 minutes if you want; but if Bjoern has more time it may be better to go wit that,

Sam

Bjoern Schiessle contacted me via private mail and offered his help so I think we can get a running site up... Here's what I think is needed:

1. Port the old design to a Content Management system
2. Implement a new, more direct workflow system. Gregor: What do you think is

the best? It could be quite similar to the old system; we just woulnd't need the "web volunteers" any more as you could do the publishing yourself easily using the CMS... 3) Include the older issues (easy enough once the CMS is running) 4) (Mabye) implement a new design

Any comments?

Chris _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@fsfeurope.org https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Le jeudi 12 janvier 2006 à 09:23 +0000, Gareth Bowker a écrit :

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 06:43:39AM +0000, Sam Liddicott wrote:

...

Something working soonest is always best, so maybe typo3.

I disagree - something which is maintainable in the long term is best, IMHO. If a CMS is set up which turns out to be a pig to maintain in the long run, then it's going to be hard to find people willing to commit the time to maintain it and it'll fall into disarray. Don't get me wrong

• ease of setup is useful, but it's not the be-all and end-all. BGW's

been going for years, so a CMS which is (hopefully) still going to be maintainable in a few years' time is important.

+1 I also believe maintenance and features are more important than installation. The site is 2 years outdated now, is it 10 min short ?

I guess setting up the proper website could take as long as translating the latest 23 issues (that are only in German from my understanding). That's at least a few weeks away.

As said earlier I'd like to participate in the translation (the big upcoming chunck and on a regular basis) and having a convenient way to do it is a definite must, even if it may not be the only/main feature needed.

G

|| On Tue, 10 Jan 2006 12:38:21 +0100 || Christoph Neuroth christoph@deshalbfrei.org wrote:

cn> I am currently doing an internship as a typo3 extension hacker at cn> a local web design company and I would love to set up a typo3 cn> site for this purpose... Would be a good opportunity to learn cn> about the workflow functions of typo3, which I haven't used cn> yet. I could even ask my boss if I can use some of my time cn> working for him for this project...

This would be really nice, and in fact an interesting enough community effort to actually write about it in the Brave GNU World. ;)

cn> However I could need a hand on doing the HTML template (design cn> sucks) and maybe need some space (I could ask Thomas if we can cn> use the deshalbfrei.org server but the domain name might be cn> confusing for people who don't understand German).

The current layout is very simple and there are multiple Typo3 things online around the world... so it should be simple to get a minimal look that is somewhat like the current (the "horned earth" is still a favorite of mine, I have to say).

Other than that I would not bother too much with it: If there is a site, I am sure someone else will find a way to improve that later.

For now, getting the actual site up and running is paramount, and the Campsite idea of Sam Liddicot seems interesting.

As I have a small vserver lying around for experimental purposes, I could give you root access on it immediately to play with this... just email me your public SSH key and I can give you access.

Regards, Georg

Bernhard Reiter bernhard@intevation.de wrote:

While a nice software helping with the workflow would be cool, I believe that the optimal end result should be a set of static pages that could just be placed on a folder to be served over the web.

And it is not necessary to set up a full blown CMS. The is a chance that it even gets in the way, by distracting from the real task. Maintaining it for a long time, is another problem. Usually just the software-updates for security issues, can be quite a hassle. Still, those are just warning, all power to the dedicated CMS builders. :-)

I agree with you, i have similar concerns if i think about CMS. Also it seems like their are very few CMS with really good support for multi-language content.

I have already thought about the possibility of such a script. But until now i don't come up with a good idea. Probably you would have to handle every language by it's own. This would also mean that every new language would require an extension of the script.

Maybe someone with good scripting knowledge have a good idea how this could be done.

Bjoern

|| On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 18:07:59 +0100 || Michael Kallas michael.kallas@web.de wrote:

mk> I think it's an important newsfeed for people who do not yet mk> participate in the fellowship - one way to reach the undecided mk> majority you mention in your other mail.

Yes, it probably is.

After almost seven years it has gotten to be something of a habitual activity. Maybe a slight reorientation to the more political and social issues would be useful, but in general I'm inclined to keep working on it.

Regards, Georg

* Bernhard Reiter bernhard@intevation.de [060105 20:27]:

...

As a result the site is horribly outdated and there are a lot of issues Brave GNU World available in German, awaiting translation by someone heroic enough to tackle that task

This is a hint: Volunteers are wanted! First step: Get the German versions and put them online: Second one: Organise translations.

I can't help translate (being a native german speaker myself I won't hurt others with my bad english ;) but If someone explains me how, I could help putting the german ones online.

Yours sincerely, Alexander

Le jeudi 05 janvier 2006 à 22:55 +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt a écrit :

I can't help translate (being a native german speaker myself I won't hurt others with my bad english ;)

If you could do a crude translation, then I suspect we can find people who can do the fixing for the English version.

My German was never good enough to translate, but fixing English is something I should be able to do. Same or better for french by the way

G.

First step: Get the German versions and put them online:

I got issues 60/61 and sent them to Mr. Greve. If he's up to taking those online, I'll start doing some more.

|| On Wed, 04 Jan 2006 17:04:28 +0100 || "Alfred M. Szmidt" ams@gnu.org wrote:

ams> Negative comments tend to cloud the positive ones, so here is a ams> postive one: I want Brave GNU World back!!!

Thanks. :)

ams> So I'm not sure that more nagging will help, rather than have ams> the opposite effect of alienating people to our valid points.

ams> Random nagging no, but if it is directed, it will help. Also, ams> we shouldn't be bothered if it alienates people, we are fighting ams> for freedom, such fights will always alienate those who wish to ams> destroy what we work for.

There are also those in the middle, who have not yet decided on either side, are not aware of the issues or are at least not actively involved in working against freedom.

These probably form the vast majority, and are our most important target audience for campaigns: Preaching to the converted is often fun, but not the most important task. Preaching to the opposed is very difficult and unlikely to convince them for various reasons, human resistance against change being one of them.

So we should not be afraid of speaking up, but we do need to keep the people in the middle in our focus: If we speak up in the wrong way, we drive them away from us, in the arms of the people who truly are opposed to our cause.

Regards, Georg

At Wed, 4 Jan 2006 10:02:33 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:

On 03-Jan-2006, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:

...

I wish there were some clear solution to this issue....

There is, simply not supporting companies that refuse to give specifications to their hardware, and nagging them to release these specs.

Which is not a solution unless everyone else does the same.

Before buying my new computer, I looked at the graphics card available, but there wasn't a single PCIe card with full specs available. So there isn't an option of "not supporting those companies".

As for Linux, that's certainly a sore spot. Many kernel developers are happy dealing with the devil. Fortunately, there are also many like Greg Kroah-Hartman:

<URL:http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html>
<URL:http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2005-October/011317.html>
<URL:http://www.kroah.com/log/2005/11/21/>

http://lwn.net/Articles/162686/ is also a good read.

Jeroen Dekkers

On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:30:44PM +0000, Alex Hudson wrote:

I'm not sure if people are noticing (probably, they are), but more and more software (Gnash included) is becoming OpenGL reliant.

One of the biggest missing pieces in the free software desktop will increasingly become good OpenGL drivers.

Thanks for raising the point. I was aware of it, but I agree that this point needs more publicity.

I have a Radeon 9200SE, which has a great free driver, and plays bzflag wonderfully. My Thinkpad has a Radeon Mobility 9000 (R250), which will hopefully run well with the upcoming r300 driver. But, these are both fairly crappy chipsets in comparison to the state of the art, and I'm to understand that beyond the r300 driver we're not going to get squat.

Still I am quite happy about the these driver efforts! If ATI can get a clear lead on the Free Software OpenGL drivers, there is a chance to some impact in the market. And this is what we need.

So we need to give people more incentive to know which hardware is better supported by Free Software (even if the manufacturer is not helping as others have pointed out).

There have been quite a few efforts to bring together Free Software hardware compatibility information, but non of them has really gained critical mass, because I am only darkly remembering some of them.

On the large scale there is a darker danger to Free Software drivers: Software patents and digital restriction management legislation! They both paint reverse engineeing as pure evil and fight it to the bone.

Bernhard