[R] www.r-project.org

[Prof Brian Ripley]

The webmasters have not AFAICS replied in this thread, and perhaps you 
should wait for them.

In particular, making cran.r-project.org an autodirector to the nearest 
mirror and replacing frames have I believe already been agreed and just 
need resources to implement (and first www. and cran.r-project.org are 
being moved to new hardware at a different physical site).

Please remember that as always R has very limited human resources and is 
the web site a high priority within those resources? (I don't judge it 
so.)

You will find discussion of frames vs css in the archives.


On Wed, 26 Apr 2006, Romain Francois wrote:

> Hi,
>
> To sum up :
> * yes, the R website is operationnal. There is no reason whatsoever to
> change its content.
> * no javascript, no flash, no chartjunk !!
> * rework the style, start wih the css file(s)
> * stop with those frames, and use css to place some kind of fake frames
> * maybe store the name of your CRAN in a cookie
>
> What about
> - place somewhere a div called 'Focus on a package' where we could have
> a short presentation of a package, etc ... or for a CRAN task view (to
> do that, php would be great, but we can do I don't know perl scripts to
> generate static html pages)
> - a direct link to download R, which will redirect to the appropriate
> CRAN thanks to cookies
> - Propose the Table of Contents of the last volume of R news.
> - reduce the ratio (size of the head page graphic) / (information
> directly accesible)
> - move search, task views, and documentation from cran to www
>
>
> Romain
>
>
>
> From roger bos :
>> After all, the r-help list doesn't even like HTML in email, so it may
>> not like too many fancy stuff on their website either.
> html in email is evil. html in a website is normal.
>
>
> From Jon Baron :
>> The only thing I might change is to replace the frames with some
>> sort of CSS-based positioning.  HOWEVER, the new version of
>> Internet Explorer may totally destroy the usefulness of CSS, so
>> maybe it is better to leave things as they are for now.
> What ! IE is not the only browser, and so not the better. Despite is
> dominant position, i don't think all website will abandon doing css
> because microsoft is not able to make its browser understand it.
>
>
>
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595