SIMILE document hosting

Eric, Mark,

In followup from today's call, I thought I would record how the SIMILE doc authoring/web-hosting/publishing process works currently.  I am open to suggestions/improvements, including a CVS repository with some appropriate host.

Here's how it works today:
1. The http://web.mit.edu/simile/www/ site is hosted at MIT, and draws from the MIT-Athena AFS directory (/mit/simile/www).  The publishing webserver allows anonymous public access.  Permisssions to the AFS directory are controlled via an athena ACL.  Write access requires an MIT athena account.  It is easy to get such an account for any SIMILE contributor, whether or not they are affiliated with MIT.  Once contributors have an Athena account, it is easy to add them to the write list.  Currently I'm the only one with write permission.

2. I am currently maintaining the master information locally (on my laptop).  When I wish to publish to the web, I tar the site (or a subset of it), scp to athena, and untar to /mit/simile/www.

3. MIT Athena is geared up to host cvs repositories, but we are not currently using such a repository for SIMILE documents.  Rob Tansley is expert on how to make cvs at MIT work (this is possible even from within corporate firewalls).  Other hosts (in particular W3C) may be possible and/or desirable.

4. Many of the source documents are Microsoft Word, with variants saved as html, and then published via http://web.mit.edu/simile.

5. Mark and I have been managing document handoffs among the editors in an ad-hoc manner.

6. Multiple versions of documents are published to the web.  Currently this occurs using conventions in the document name (i.e. "somedoc 0.22.html", "somedoc 0.24.html").  I would suggest that we continue this practice even if version info were also maintained via, say, cvs.  Doing so would allow those without access to the cvs repository to still access the various versions of a document.

I am open to improvements and changes to the process noted above.  I propose that we continue working in the way described above until such changes can be identified, turned on, and tested.

Finally, I note that we have two distinct need sets:
	- collaborative authoring
	- web hosting and publishing
These might need to be addressed by orthogonal mechanisms/solutions.


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Mick Bass


Manager
Research and Business Development
Digital Media Systems Program
HP Laboratories
Hewlett-Packard Company
1 Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142


617.551.7634 office    617.551.7650 fax
617.899.3938 mobile    617.627.9694 residence
bass@alum.mit.edu      mick_bass@hp.com
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Received on Friday, 28 March 2003 14:21:27 UTC