Subject: [Tools-discuss] Re: New tool prototypes

From: "Michael A. Patton" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 10:13:01 -0400 (EDT)

I just spent some time playing with the HTMLized agendas and WG status
pages.  Yes, I realize these are agendas for the just past meeting,
but I was exploring with an eye towards being familiar with how they
worked and (most importantly) to think about feedback.  So, here's a
report.  Henrik was almost the only one I sent to for reasons that
I'll get to below...

First, I found it very nice, in general.  But, I did actually think of
one suggestion that might be very helpful.  Often there are individual
submission IDs that are intended to be relevant for a specific WG.
While these are not official WG docs, it might be useful to have them
listed in a section at the end of the draft status page.  While in the
long run it would be nice for this to actually be captured by the ID
submission process, it can be done today with better than 90% success
just by noting if the facet of the file name following the author
field is an IETF WG acronym.  Most authors intending a draft for a
specific WG usually do that.

So, that was the suggestion I was going to make.  The rest of this
message chronicals the saga of what followed my having the idea of
that improvement...

First, a quick glance at the left margin showed a "Feedback" entry.  I
said "my how nice"...and one of the items was a wiki.  I'd used
several other wikis and thought I'd go there.  Unfortunately, I didn't
quite find what I was looking for.  There was a page for suggesting
additional tools which I considered editing, but it didn't seem quite
right (and I wasn't exactly sure which sub-heading to use, but that's
the glory of a wiki, if I goofed someone who knew better could fix
it), there didn't seem to be anything like suggested improvements.  So
I decided to defer on this option.

OK, so we fall back to the mailing list.  There's an item in the
"Feedback" heading for that, we'll try that next.  Unfortunately, when
I click that I get a page whose body contains only:
    %(content)s
    Latest update:
which I think is a typo in some prototype page somewhere (shouldn't
the "s" be inside the parens?).  This happens from the several places
that I've tried.  I might have been able to guess the mailing list
address from the URL of that page (and would have been right):
    http://tools.ietf.org/ext/www1.ietf.org/mailman//listinfo/tools-discuss
but now I had three things to report, with some of greater importance,
so I decided on an approach that would guarantee at least one useful
party would get it.  I found the email announcement in my mailer
(which is where I'd actually started the exploration from) and just
did a "reply to author" figuring that Henrik could forward as
appropriate.

Luckily in the process of typing up this report and doing additional
research, I did happen upon a page with the mailing list explicitly
mentioned, so I updated the "To:" field in the partially composed
reply and edited the last sentence of the first paragraph.  And now
off it goes...

	-MAP

_______________________________________________
Tools-discuss mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tools-discuss

---

From: "Michael A. Patton" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 15:25:52 -0400 (EDT)

Date: Tue, 05 Apr 2005 21:14:35 +0200
   From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>

   On 2005-04-05 4:13 pm Michael A. Patton said the following:
   > [I suggested] individual
   > submission IDs that are [relevant be]
   > listed in a section at the end of the draft status page.

   Agreed.  This will be in the next update I make to the prototype.

Yeah, I think it'll turn out to be quite useful.

...
   > the "s" be inside the parens?).

   Ok, so the long and short of this is (if I got it right):
	   1) Check up the wiki pages and fix as needed,
	   2) Add an explicit Feedback mailing-list address to the
	      prototype pages

Actually, #2 wasn't what I was saying, but also is a good idea.  There
is a link for "mailing list", it's just that the page it links to is
broken...

As for the wiki, a little thought makes me think there should be a
wiki page listing tools that you have (i.e. the drafts status page and
the HTMLized agendas so far), linking to one page per each with a
place for suggestions re that tool.

	-MAP

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Apr 2005 21:14:35 +0200

Hi Michael,

    Thanks for the feedback!  More below:

Thanks!

	Henrik

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Apr 2005 21:47:10 +0200

On 2005-04-05 9:25 pm Michael A. Patton said the following:
[...]
> is a link for "mailing list", it's just that the page it links to is

Ok.

> place for suggestions re that tool.

Right, that sounds like a good idea.

	Henrik