[OpenAFS] OpenAFS Web page...

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Thursday, July 14, 2005 11:28:24 AM -0400 Rodney M Dyer 
<rmdyer@uncc.edu> wrote:

> It appears that OpenAFS 1.3.8500 is out now.  I think the "1.3.8400"
> string in the release flash needs to be fixed...
>
>       11-Jul-2005 - OpenAFS 1.3.85 Released!
>       OpenAFS 1.3.84 represents the new stable Windows release, and
> includes a multitude of bug fixes as well as several new features. For
> Unix platforms, 1.3.85 includes several important fixes for bugs in
> previous versions of OpenAFS 1.3.

I see no "1.3.8400" string.  I do see a "1.3.84".
If you're going to complain about an obvious oversight, you could at least 
make an effort to avoid the same kind of mistake in your complaint.

Fixed.


> Also, can someone please add a line break after the news flash for the
> following item...
>
>       22-Mar-2005 - AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop
>       The second annual AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop will be
> held June 20-24, 2005 at Carnegie Mellon University. The workshop will
> include two days of tutorials and three days of talks including keynote
> speaker Mike Kazar, one of the original developers of AFS. For more
> information or to submit a talk or paper, see
> http://www.pmw.org/afsbpw05/.

Looks fine to me.  There are not line breaks after any of these items; they 
are elements in a DL.  We do insert a blank paragraph after those items 
which contain bullet lists, since it seems that otherwise some browsers 
like to eat the whitespace between the bullet list and the next news item.


> Please pay attention to cosmetic detail.  In order for OpenAFS to grow,
> people need to think it is managed by competent individuals, and the web
> site is the only "face" for the group right now.

We do pay attention to cosmetic detail, to some extent.  However, our core 
competency is in developing and maintaining high-quality distributed 
filesystem software.  Would you rather we spent our time doing that, or 
looking at every possible Web browser in the universe (you didn't say what 
yours was) to make sure everything looks pixel-perfect.

For the most part, I subscribe to the original design philosophy of the 
web, which holds that content providers are responsible for content, and 
the user's browser is responsible for form.  People who forget this tend to 
produce web sites filled with tiny images, gaudy graphics, and features 
that are not widely impemented, or at least not widely implemented 
correctly, all in the name of producing beautiful graphic design, generally 
at the expense of usability or actually getting the information out.

I've seen plenty of pages that must look great on Windows, because between 
the broken colors, text obscured by graphics, and badly-aligned images, I 
can't read them at all.  The OpenAFS page may not the result of 
professional "web design", but it's _readable_ and _usable_.


As for whether the project is "managed by competent individuals" and what 
affect that might have on whether it "grows"....  OpenAFS is not a company; 
it is an open-source software product.  While it's sort of cool to be able 
to say that some major company or institution is using AFS (or even, to 
know it but _not_ be able to say it), we are not in it for market share. 
As an AFS administrator, I care a hell of a lot more about whether the 
software works than about what someone I've never heard of thinks about my 
competence as a software developer based on how well or poorly his browser 
renders the OpenAFS web site.



> And, why is it that when I right-click to download the source
> distribution "openafs-1.3.85-src.tar.bz2" the dialog saves the file as
> "openafs-1.3.85-src.tar.tar" ???

I don't know.  Perhaps your browser is trying to "protect" you by making 
sure a file whose content-type is application/x-tar always has an extension 
of ".tar".  It works fine for me.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@cmu.edu>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA