Re: Why the change? (was Re: Today's transition for www.ietf.org)

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



Hi Andrew,

On 12/01/2018 10:03, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
...
> People who don't know what an IETF is sometimes have occasion to need
> to know, and what they will do is put "IETF" into their favourite way
> of searching and end up at the front website page.  If that front page
> is overwhelmingly arranged to meet the needs of those who already know
> what an IETF is, then the new curious people will effectively be
> turned away.  This has been a problem for the IETF in its relationship
> with others: it makes it harder to persuade others that the IETF
> really is offering useful, contemporary standards for how the Internet
> does and should work.
> 
> Therefore, IETF participants are being asked to endure the
> inconvenience of moving their most-used stuff to a different place, so
> that the other audience can be addressed.

My understanding was that human-intensive maintenance of the pages was
also an issue, so my attitude was that we have to tolerate some of the
undesirable side-effects of modern "web site design" to reduce the
maintenance OPEX. And we have to better accomodate smart phones, with
other undesirable side-effects. Not to mention accessibility issues.

I think the problem of new people finding themselves on the home page
could have easily been fixed on the old site by adding a prominent
"Who we are and what we do" link there. (There has been a link there for
newcomers for years, but that was aimed at new *participants*, not
random people.

> 
> I think it reasonable to take issue with broken links (which I believe
> are being rectified -- i.e. I think this must be a bug, since the
> plans were always not to break any links).

I think it was not to break any *important* links, wasn't it?

There was a quite long list of "sacred" links that was available for
community comment. If your favourite link is not in there, you know who
to blame. If a link in that list is broken, the contractor is to blame.
I'm not sure if it's the final version, but a version is included in
https://iaoc.ietf.org/documents/IETF-Website-SOW-20140604-Final.pdf

Regards,

     Brian




[Index of Archives]     [IETF Annoucements]     [IETF]     [IP Storage]     [Yosemite News]     [Linux SCTP]     [Linux Newbies]     [Fedora Users]