Re: preview-latex 0.9.1 and AUCTeX 11.whatever

* David Kastrup (2005-03-19) writes:

> b) all documentation should refer to the new mailing lists (that
> should work at the time of the release), CVS archives, web pages,
> whatever.
[...]
> And I also do not want to wait too long for that.  The next AUCTeX
> will probably be called 11.60 if we don't bundle preview-latex, and
> 11.90 if we do bundle it.

In case preview-latex gets bundled with AUCTeX, I'd like to discuss
how this should be reflected on the web page.  We currently have a
single page which already is a bit lengthy.  In order to allow people
having a peek of what is about to come further down the page and
making that easily accessible I want to provide a navigation menu.
This will probably be placed where the screenshots are now and the
screenshots themselves will move further down.  That means the page
will look something like this:

+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| AUCTeX  An integrated TeX/LaTeX environment                      |
+--------------------------------------------------+---------------+
| About                                            | Navigation    |
| ------------------------------------------------ | About         |
| Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text     | Features      |
| Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text     | Download      |
| ...                                              | Documentation |
|                                                  | ...           |
|                                                  | Screenshots   |
|                                                  | +-----------+ |
|                                                  | |           | |
|                                                  | |           | |
|                                                  | +-----------+ |

Does preview-latex need a separate page?  In this case I will have to
change the points in the menu above to sub entries and we'd get
something like

Main
  About
  Features
  ...
preview-latex
  About
  Features
  ...

The more preview-latex gets integrated the less this will make sense.
So what we could do instead is splitting the page into smaller chunks
based on the current sections.  Then it would be possible to better
describe preview-latex in the Features section.

With smaller chunks users would have to do more paging which I am not
really a fan of[1], although there are some nice, clean examples[2] on
the net.

Another challenge will be the screenshots.  Personally I like them
very much at the place they currently are.  But if we want to show
examples of preview-latex as well, the front page might become to
demanding in terms of download size (besides, it will not work if
there is only few content left after chunking).  So we might have to
move them onto their own page which will leave some "wasted" space in
the right column on pages with more content.  I would have suggested
to make a horizontal menu right below the banner but we have to much
sections for this.  Oh well, it's probably not a big problem because
nowadays there are many sites which look like this.  Maybe it can be
improved by moving away from the somewhat boxed style and open up the
columns.

Anyway, I was just thinking loudly.  It would help me juggling this
stuff, though, if we decided what has to be added when preview-latex
gets integrated.


Footnotes: 
[1] See e.g.
<URL:http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/51/paging_scrolling.htm>
for a study on paging versus scrolling.
[2] See e.g. <URL:http://www.castofshadows.net/cover.php>.  I know
this is not a site about some software, so one cannot really compare
it, but I like the idea of a web page for a software which helps
typesetting documents to look like one of these documents, e.g. a
book.

-- 
Ralf