The basic issue for me is that from the tools page I expect to find the tools.
The fact that the tools are buried at http://tools.ietf.org/tools is
something I could learn. But that would mean that for all practical
purposes I would treat that as the tools page. I actually
appreciated the tools being listed in the sidebar so I could easily
see where the tool I needed was. (So I'm a geek; id-nits is actually
more meaningful to mean than "Check internet-drafts for submission nits")
The news page really would seem to belong at news.ietf.org. it does
seem like a nice page.
For me, the page loading time is not an issue. But I think that it
is an issue for enough people that it at least should have been thought about.
Yours,
Joel
At 03:32 PM 11/2/2007, Henrik Levkowetz wrote:
Hi Joel,
On 2007-11-02 18:00 Joel M. Halpern said the following:
> I second John's note. When I saw Pasi's note, I had assumed that he
> was referring to a link off of the tools page.
> Replacing the tools page with an activity summary is quite surprising.
> Joel
Hmm. I'm not sure exactly what's the issue here, so let's try to
explore this and see what we can find out.
Essentially, the change is two-fold:
1. The old lefthand list of links have been replaced by the same lefthand
list of links which appear on all the WG and other tools pages, making
for one less list of links to keep up-to-date manually. This has been
in the works for quite some time; I've tried to poll people on it, and
most people seem to be happier with the lefthand menu on the WG pages
than the front page menu.
2. Replacing the static text on the first page with a news item page.
The static text that was replaced was as follows:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to the IETF Tools Pages
These pages are maintained by the IETF Tools Team.
The aim of these web-pages is to help the IETF community as follows:
* Make it easy to find existing tools
* Provide means of feedback on existing and new tools (wiki and mailing
list)
* Provide information on new and updated tools
If you have comments on these pages, or ideas for new tools or for
refinement of current tools, please send them to tools-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
For current tools, there may also be a page in the IETF tools wiki (in
addition to the tools page you can reach through the menu to the left)
which summarises proposals and known deficiencies - feel welcome to
check this out, and contribute your information!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The way I see it, replacing that with a news summary would be a good
idea. The text above was appropriate when the tools pages were being
established; they are now used by a lot of people, and the text above
seems to be a bit superfluous.
I could be wrong about that, and if so, an indication of how you
feel about the old and new page would be good. Some options are:
- You would specifically like to keep the text above (or some
modification of it).
- You agree that it's time for a re-working of the front page, but you
don't want to have the latest happenings on the front page, you want
them as a separate news page.
- You don't care too much what's at the front page, as long as it's
not too heavy-weight -- the major objection isn't to the news page as
such, but to the increased size of the page *for you personally as a
consumer of the page*
- Some other option which I haven't understood the importance of yet,
which you will be able to formulate better than I can here :-)
Please speak up and indicate as specifically as you can what's good and
bad about the change, and how we can improve it; and we'll try to make it
so!
Regards,
Henrik
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