RE: JS page templates and topics

+1 to everything you've written. this is very approachable.


Sent from my "smart" phone... go figure...


-------- Original message --------
From: Max Polk
Date:12/07/2013 10:56 AM (GMT-08:00)
To: Webplatform List
Subject: JS page templates and topics

Concerning JS page templates, I'm happy to see Eliezer is tackling the
outstanding flags issue:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webplatform/2013Dec/0035.html

Eliezer and all, can I begin talking about the topics and topic
clusters?  It feels like a good top-level issue to tackle relating to JS
templates.  With multiple people working the same thing we don't want
overlap.  Assuming I can move forward, here are a few notes.

The overall approach to topics and topic clusters is nicely described:
     http://is.gd/kl5LIu

For this email let's stick with just topic.  Let us glance at "CSS" and
"CSS-Regions" topics, the first being for the 'basic meta data' use case
for lots of pages, and the second being for 'API Basic Listing
Configuration Query' use case for multi-layered page hierarchy.

For the multi-layer, the "CSS-Regions" is used inside pages of template
type {{API_Object}}, so a search can be formed to find it automatically,
such as:

{{API_Listing|Query=[[Category:CSS-Regions]][[Category:API_Objects]] ...

For multi-layer, the template type is highly aligned with topic.

We could go with non-multi-layer, and decide the topic is only
"JavaScript language", then have a single template for all pages in it.
It's simple, it's reasonable, and it's fast to get up and running.

At the moment we have two legacy template types for JavaScript pages:
"JavaScript Operator" and "JavaScript Statement".  See the new page
selector to glance at them:

     http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:New_Page

We could simplify and stick with just one template and one topic. So
this is the very first decision to make, what *kinds* of JavaScript
pages will there, relevant to the kind of template each will use.  And
do we want the simple approach of non-multi-layered.

What will guide the answering of this crucial question is the notion of
what general structure the various JS pages will have. At the moment,
there is generally only one structure, so the simple non-multi-layered
approach sounds good at first thought.

Topics currently:
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Property:Topics

The above contains "JavaScript".  Many pages are tagged with it:
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Category:JavaScript

We could start a new "JavaScript language" topic and I could add this to
all pages being uploaded:
     {{Topics|JavaScript language}}

By adding that Topics template it creates the category "JavaScript
language".  We have to, by convention, edit that category page and make
it part of the "Topics" category, the needed manual step for new topics
as documented at (http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Topics).

We will defer topic clusters, for later:
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Property:Topic_Cluster