I wanna make a TADS 3 wiki / consolidate resources!

I’m not suggesting it was directly related to anything on tads.dev. I was wondering if something happened at layer 8, like @fos1 seeing this thread and thinking “I should get this resource cleaned up” and breaking it by accident.

I do hope @fos1’s site comes back, perhaps tads.dev could host it as well?

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https://tads.dev/docs/adv3Lite/manual/docs/

Oh you mean…these? :smirk:

i don’t actually know if these are what yall are talking about lol

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That front page is exactly what was on FOS, though it looks like some of your subresources are broken right now. Currently, the library reference manual is 404, the system manual goes to an empty page, and the library manual is only current to 1.6.1.

Thanks, it’s rebuilding with at least some fixes. I need to regenerate the adv3lite library docs to be 2.1.1 eventually, so maybe all this effort currently to fix the formatting of the old docs is kind of silly, but I figure I might as well have some functional version of the site instead of a perfect version. It’s difficult since a lot of it was not html 5 or was referencing URLs in different ways than my site was set up.

Re: the libref, I think it would be easier to navigate around it using the periplus right now.

EDIT: I created a branch for fixing all the link stuff so I don’t clutter up the main branch. If you notice an error and want to fix it, I welcome you to fork and edit too!

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Looked a bit around: I liked the .htm version of cloak of darkness, adv3Lite version, and I think that the examples (both adv3 and adv3Lite) can benefits from this HTML rendition, the main issue being that the very long comments often obstruct the understanding of the relationship and flow of code between the various parts of the examples, somewhat defeating their mission (and I guess that I have an high level in the “code reading” skill…), so the different coloring & styling of code and comments via CSS is a marked improvement.

(of course, in the meantime, up until an downloadable .zip of the consolidated resources project, I have saved the Cloak.htm (and css) in its proper place, if/doc/eng/tads3/htm/cod :slight_smile: Thanks, Eric !)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

That goes into the issue I mentioned with syntax highlighting in the readme. At the very least I can do syntax highlighting and tell the codeblock that it’s javascript which is Close Enough (and would solve at least the comments issue); however the other one is this:

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Indeed! Are those linked from the tads.dev main page though? I wasn’t seeing it.

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They aren’t, I’ll add them soon.

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Update: I tried to fix this for like an hour and my soul eroded so I stopped. If anyone has a better idea of how to do this, let me know.

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Updating syntax highlighting seems to me like a Long Term Project ™ and not as important as hosting all the docs in a way that we can easily link to sections when we’re referring to them.

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Agreed, also it makes my soul die. Aside from the docs listed, what are other ones you’d like me to add? I know it’s woefully incomplete right now :sweat_smile:

COD’s htm file is a special case of sort, because there was an introduction, hence the introduction (by hand ?) of <div class= "code">

the examples are pure .t code, without introduction, so theoretically having an automated creation of a <comment> class, keeping the rest of the code as is (perhaps improved with styling/sizing/colouring at body { level.

Simplified, albeit I don’t think I have explained clearly, I think that with a .t file with issues with particulary long comment (as is, IMVHO, our case), limiting the .css effort to them, and automating the markup of the comment (not difficult, because are clearly delemited with /* ... */ or //) should be feasible with a sed or awk or perl script.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

I’ll take a look at adding HTML versions of these examples that use the Cloak of Darkness comment formatting.

And by the time you get it done I may well have released version 2.2 (planned for early March). I think we need to find a solution that doesn’t require a lot of reformatting of the HTML documentation. I’ll have a little think about it.

EDIT: For example, entering site: https://www.tads.org DefaultAnyTopic into Bing pretty much instantly comes up with summaries and links to useful parts of the TADS 3/adv3 documentation (although other searches I tried weren’t quite so successful). Might there be some way of leveraging that rather than trying to arm wrestle the TADS documentation into a preferred format? What one might then need is a site that could host the adv3Lite documentation as is.

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if you have any ideas then I’m open to hearing them, I’m not sure how to do it.

ETA:

I want to emphasize something.

I do not have the ability to do this site all by myself.

I need help. I am not the most knowledgeable when it comes to tech, much less TADS. If someone has a feature request or suggestion, please help me implement it. I’m going about this the best ways I know how, which are undoubtedly not the Best Ways.

Additionally I have a job and a life and limited spoons.

I’m assuming people attempting to do these TADS aggregation sites alone before is why they’ve died on the vine. I need community help implementing it.

Not just in this thread; work on the code, open a pull request and I’ll likely integrate it.

If you want a TADS resource consolidation site like I do, help me make it.

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I’m a lot like you as far as time and skill set go but I do want to help. I’m just not sure what or how. I looked back through the thread and I’m not that familiar with a lot of the tech being used.
Could there be a list of tasks that need to be addressed and maybe a brief description of what is involved with them?

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@dsherwood there’s the readme (it’s a bit out of date). the main two tasks (explained there) currently are:

  1. updating the site with existing external resources (links to others’ guides and documentation etc) and organizing them in a helpful way - high priority
  2. figuring out how to host (or include) updates to adv3lite documentation and code easier - medium priority

the custom lexer/comment syntax is a distant last priority. the lunr.js search is technically done, though it requires the static file pages to “count” as jekyll pages to be indexed, which is why I hosted and reformatted stuff. So maybe a site with a google search bar might be better.

Though to tell the truth @Eric_Eve, updating the formatting for the adv3Lite docs wasn’t so hard. Technically a lot of it isn’t even necessary, I just need to insert the liquid --- --- at the top of the file for Jekyll to count even the html (though it can break when non-html5 code is used). What I was wrestling with for a bit was actually broken internal links. Still, regenerating and updating it all every time you update the code is far from ideal – and I’d still have to update the periplus by hand.

If anyone has an ability to help with or improve any of these, please do so.

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OK, Thanks! Let me see what I can do.

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The Adv3Lite docs on FarOutScience are now up to date and available again. The FOS server is VERY old. I borked it recently when trying to update the docs. I tried moving the server to an up to date hardware and OS and it just wouldn’t work. It is now restored.

PS. it is an old legacy resource site for a classes I taught in the early 2000s. I’ll get 'round to it as my mother used to say. :wink:

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@Piergiorgio_d_errico
I’ve now updated the examples accordingly so they’re now in HTML files with the comments formatted differently from the code (and some introductory text for each example. They’re still reachable from the same link: Examples, which means that @pieartsy doesn’t need to change anything at her site for it to access these upgraded files.

They may need a little further tweaking in due course, but hopefully they’re now more readily usable as they now are.

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