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Want to help out? Got HTML / CSS / Javascript fu?

July 10th, 2007 by Bryan O'Sullivan

One of the online book development projects that I really admire is The Django Book. The visual look of the site is clean, and their feedback system is excellent. At Foo Camp last month, I talked with Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss about how the feedback system has worked out for them, and they’ve been thrilled with the response they’ve gotten through it. They’ve received every granularity of feedback from grammar corrections through detailed suggestions on restructuring entire chapters to make them flow better. Wow!

Another excellent feedback system is the one used by the Free Software Foundation to solicit comments on draft versions of their licenses. If you’re not familiar with it, take a look at the site for draft 1 of the GNU Affero GPL.

Unfortunately, Adrian and Jacob described the server side of the Django Book’s feedback system as unreleasable, and to the best of my knowledge, the FSF hasn’t released the server-side code for their feedback system. So there’s nothing prepackaged that we can use to get a similar benefit.

I would be thrilled if we could fire up some volunteers who’d be interested in working on the Real World Haskell web presence. There are several aspects to this work, each requiring a different set of skills.

  • Generating CSS-friendly HTML from DocBook XML.
  • Presentation of the material: an appealing visual style that makes the HTML content easy to read.
  • The browser side of the feedback system, allowing people to submit and read comments down to the individual paragraph level.
  • The server side of the feedback system, letting us delete comments as we integrate suggestions into the text.
  • Comment spam filtering deeply appreciated.

In principle, we can do all of this work ourselves, but I’d love to get some outside involvement, and I know that Mike, our editor, would really like us to stay focused on cranking out the chapters.

Better yet, I think it would be wonderful to be able to package a feedback system in such a way that it’s releasable and useful to other Open Access and Creative Commons authors.

So! Here’s your chance to make a (literally) visible contribution to an exciting project, possibly with wider benefits to the OA and CC communities. If you want to talk about taking part, drop me a line at bos@serpentine.com. None of this work requires any pre-existing Haskell knowledge, by the way :-)

7 Comments »

7 Responses to “Want to help out? Got HTML / CSS / Javascript fu?”

  1. on 10 Jul 2007 at 08:03 UTC1 Christian Vest Hansen

    Wouldn’t it be easier to get ahold of the django stuff, put it on launchpad, and then make it releaseable?

  2. on 10 Jul 2007 at 09:30 UTC2 Neil Mitchell

    The FSF always said that as soon as the GPL 3 was out, they would release their editor tool, under the GPL 3. If you go prodding now, you may well find it.

  3. on 10 Jul 2007 at 13:45 UTC3 Alan Falloon

    The comment system for the Django Book looks a lot like the comment system used by the reviewboard software, and that is OSS and released: http://code.google.com/p/reviewboard/

    So it looks like we at least have an example to follow for the client-side js stuff.

  4. on 10 Jul 2007 at 15:44 UTC4 Keith Fahlgren

    Generating CSS-friendly HTML from DocBook XML.

    High-quality DocBook->(X)HTML (and DocBook->FO, which we’ll use with customizations to typeset your book) transformations are already available from the DocBook-XSL project: http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookXslStylesheets (which is good, as it’d take a gigantic amount of work to duplicate).

    Here’s the canonical reference book on HTML output: http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/HtmlOutput.html

    I’m very interesting in what the community thinks would be the easiest, best solution to this problem.

  5. on 10 Jul 2007 at 18:08 UTC5 Bryan O'Sullivan

    Christian: notice that I mentioned that Adrian and Jacob described the Django feedback code as “unreleasable” :-)

    Neil: I’ll try poking someone at the FSF, thanks.

    Alan: the client side js stuff that the Django Book uses is already visible, as otherwise their code wouldn’t work :-) They use some YUI widgets, I believe.

  6. on 11 Jul 2007 at 00:19 UTC6 Ryan T Mulligan

    Where’s the repository?

  7. on 11 Jul 2007 at 15:30 UTC7 manu

    Yes, why not copy the ‘Django Book’ javascript and adapt the CSS ? The interface is clear and effective.

    There’s nothing glorius about copying their Javascript tabs-mechanism but… well… it’d save time !!

    Is it a possibility ???