Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-07-21

Report on the J wiki meeting of July 21, 2022

Present: Art Anger, John Baker, Raul Miller, Bob Therriault, Michal Wallace

1. Bob presented an idea for transitioning the wik by using the yellow J wiki as a prototype https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page and gradually make changes to the blue J wiki https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page . This allows us to change the structure of the blue wiki by moving pages based on what will be prototyped in the yellow wiki. This retains the links of the blue wiki for historic purposes and any pages developed in the yellow wiki would have their history start on the blue wiki at the point at which they would be adopted. Bob has started on deleting some of the orphan pages that Eric's web crawler found in November https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Eric_Iverson/Site_Map. Raul added a wiki crawler that he had written that is stood in the discussion of the index page https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Talk:Help/Index_A
2. Bob found some CSS powers that Eric has explored on some of his pages that allows for customization of individual pages to the point that the generic wiki search can be hidden and this might be useful on the phrases page where Chris Burke's search may be more useful than the generic search. Michal mentioned that it may be useful to have some common searches included that would direct the newcomer to areas that might be more helpful to them. Bob showed Eric's two home pages https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Eric_Iverson/Home and https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Eric_Iverson/Home2 Raul supplied a way of editing Eric's 'uneditable' by changing the url of the edit link on a different page and then changing the page id to Eric's. Bob showed some changes that he had made to Raul's Index pages moving the expand and collapse from the right side of the page to the left side as well as changing the expand and collapse to show and hide. These changes are seen in the A https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Help/Index_A , B https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Help/Index_B and C https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Help/Index_C entries in the index. Raul suggested that you might do a class for these examples so that you could set the CSS across the wiki and it would only affect the collapsible parts in Help. Raul also mentioned that some of the striping on his original version had been lost. Bob will work on changing the CSS back so that the stripes are retained.
3. Raul showed some of the things that he had found out about syntax highlighting using CSS an example could be seen at https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/TurtleGraphics showing that the J wiki supports some syntax highlighting (strings are red, comments are italicized) Raul is using a <source lang=j> tag to enclose code that should have syntax highlighting https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SyntaxHighlight It is based on a Pygment and John mentioned that he was familiar with Pygment in its use with LAtex and that it probably used REGEX expressions to identify the syntax of the language. Raul found that it was based on Geshi and it may be possible to use this in other areas of J as well https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/extensions/SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi Bob wondered if there were some consistent way to highlight syntax and John suggested that there is not consistency, but that a blogging site https://dev.to seems to render syntax highlighting in J well. Raul mentioned that the colours are set as classes so that they could be changed in CSS.
4. Discussing the structure of the wiki Michal thought the icons were a more friendly way to encourage newcomers. Bob mentioned that he might not use as much of the icon view in certain areas such as reference or archives which are a bit more information intensive. Bob showed the main page with four sub pages which in turn would have subpages that would enable breadcrumb tracing for navigation https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page . In addition Bob has added a Navigation index that provides a breadcrumb, but this requires each branch of the tree to have its own navigation bar. Raul felt that there was a way to have the wiki build a navigation bar based on the structure of the wiki, but this would require the wiki to be put in a specific structure. Raul says that there is also an extension that is installed that allows us to do arbitrary stuff using lua. The archive branch could be put as a text link on the reference page https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page/Reference. Since the archive pages are not current, this would reduce their visibility , but still leave them available if required. Bob also thought it would be a good idea to divide the essays into topics to make the navigation a bit easier. Raul suggested the lab taxonomy and Bob thought that add ons taxonomy could be used as well. This would make it easier for newcomers to access the information. Nuvoc https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/NuVoc would be left intact in terms of of structure, but when the J playground is mature https://jsoftware.github.io/j-playground/bin/html2/# links could preload the examples in the primitive descriptions and allow the user to interact with the examples. For the J playground, it would be good to have a link to J playground as part of the <source lang-=j> It might make sense to use the J playground link as an attribute so that you can choose to link or not. One advantage of this would be that changes to the enclosed code would be reflected in what was sent to playground.
5. Michal asked if there were some type of a todo list for when people have time. Up to this point we have left people to their own initiative. A good place to experiment is the yellow wiki https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page. The Rosetta pages are a good area to expand if the contributor knows languages that may need translation https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page/Rosetta. Bob said he would see what he could do to create a check list that would allow evaluation of the orphan pages and decisions about where pages might be put.

For access to previous meeting reports https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki_Development

If you would like to participate in the development of the J wiki please contact us on the general forum and we will get you an invitation to the next J wiki meeting held on Thursdays at 23:00 (UTC) Next meeting is July 28th, 2022.