Re: IAFA templates: a user's comment

[Jill Foster <[e-mail]>]

At 9:45 am 24/3/95, Martijn Koster wrote:
>Thomas Krichel wrote:
>
>>   Martijn Koster writes:
>>
>> ...
>>
>> > The variant part of the IAFA templates are a quick fix for a small
>> > domain of problems surrounding manifestations of a
>> > document. Personally I'd like to see it removed altogether, but it'll
>> > have to stay in for backward compatibility.

I've never liked the way variants are handled. It's ugly and not template
user (filler in) friendly. (I did say this right in the early stages years
ago.)

>
>Sure, ALIWEB also filters out bogus templates. But someone somewhere
>is writing the template, probably by hand, and probably without having
>read all $$ pages of the iafa draft. So it _has_ to be simple.

We're trying to base the TRAINMAT templates on the IAFA moving targets -
but have not really used the variants format. We want to - but have hedged
round it a little for practical reasons. (Difficult to provide a general
purpose template that could be filled in by a non-iafa guru without a user
manual.) Different versions/formats of a piece of network training material
should have only one template in order that people can find them as a group
and decide which suits them best and so that template maintainers don't
have to complete 50 templates for one resource (they just won't do it).

Mark Prior (Univ. Adelaide) has the catalogue on line and the template as a
form for people to complete. See below. This is a real life example using
resources that cover both electronic formats, paper published formats and
video. (It broke the original TopNode model.)

To access the document online you may use the World Wide Web at the
University of Adelaide (Australia)

  http://coolabah.itd.adelaide.edu.au/TrainMat/catalogue.html
  http://coolabah.itd.adelaide.edu.au/TrainMat/template.html

Comments welcome.

-- Jill