19 September 2001Dario Menasce: A proposal For The

BTeV's Web Site 1

A Proposal For A BTeV Web Site

Dario MenasceI.N.F.N. Milano

19 September 2001Dario Menasce: A proposal For The

BTeV's Web Site 2

Outline

• Purpose of a BTeV Web Site

• Discussion about the Home Page structure (level 0)

• List of proposed pages at level 0

• Loose definition of pages at lower levels

• Strategy to develop a template

• Discussion about tools of the trade

• Static vs dynamic pages: database and languages issues

• Responsibility sharing (Web mastership and dependencies…)

• A practical example (template) to start discussion

19 September 2001Dario Menasce: A proposal For The

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• Purpose of a BTeV Web site is twofold:

1) provide useful and captivating public pages

2) provide useful and searchable internal pages

• Concepts such as ‘useful’ , ‘captivating’ and ‘searchable’ depend upon context and have some intrinsic relativity

• For the general public, useful means:

What is BTeV, how can I contact people, where is the experiment, what the heck is Beauty and CP violation?...

But the general public might even be a fellow scientist, so alsomore detailed information about the physics should be available

Purpose of a BTeV Web Site (1)

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Purpose of a BTeV Web Site (2)

• For a collaborator useful means much, much more:

A tool to navigate down to the hierarchy of pages that constitute the whole BTeV infospace without getting quickly lost

A search engine (to retrieve documents, to navigate in the experiment’s source code, to locate details about detectors…)

A set of highly dynamic pages to interface to the counting room, allowing people to remotely control the experiment

A comprehensive set of tools for remote upload of documents (anyone should be able to contribute to the overall content of the site, even those totally unaware of HTML subtleties…)

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Purpose of a BTeV Web Site (3)

• Also captivating has different meanings and implications:

Public pages are usually consulted by non specialists (quite often by students or would-be scientists). A nice looking page conveys a favorable impression and invites to further inquires in the site. A captivating page, in this context, translates to a professionally laid out series of pages, easy to browse into, with a clear scheme of navigation (will elaborate further on this point)

A physicists needs such an aesthetic layout much less: what matters to him is quick and easy access to documents. Actually a nice looking page can help quite a lot to reach such a goal (again, examples later)

Esthetical layout and good internal structure are therefore tightly correlated

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Discussion about the Home Page structure (level 0)

• A valid approach to both aesthetics and easiness of navigation requires a multiframe approach to the Home Page

To locate a point in space three coordinates are required: a WEB page is a multi dimensional surface, so let’s see how two coordinates suffice to navigate in this complex space:

Goes down intodeeper level directories

Moves along choicesof directories at the same level

Area where thefinal documentgoes displayed

19 September 2001Dario Menasce: A proposal For The

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A practical example (1)

The proposedBTeV home

page

The proposedBTeV home

page

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A practical example (2)

One level downOne level down

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A practical example (3)

Another level downAnother level down

At any level youcan go back to theprevious level, butyou always knowwhere you are.

At any level youcan go back to theprevious level, butyou always knowwhere you are.

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A practical example (4)

The final page with the requested document

The final page with the requested document

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List of proposed pages at level 0

• Whatever the approach to the coordinate system, the first issue to solve is defining the access points to our site. Here is a tentative list synthesized from the already existing site

All relevant information concerning collaborators

Information about policy to join the collaboration

Entry point to several options to contact the collaboration, addresses and phone numbers

19 September 2001Dario Menasce: A proposal For The

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List of proposed pages at level 0

• As mentioned in the introduction, some levels of the site have sublevels nested into them. Here is how a hierarchy is laid out.

19 September 2001Dario Menasce: A proposal For The

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List of proposed pages at level 0 Here the hierarchy is laid out to explicit the sublevels dependency

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Loose definition of pages at lower levels (1)

• The more a user dives deeper into the pages hierarchy, presumably the more specific becomes the content of the level.

• We must specify at some point where the overall infrastructure of the site ends and where subsites, managed by different individuals (other than a selected group of web-masters), begins to be accessed.

• The Web was specifically invented to avoid the need for a centralized location of electronic documents and the need of an omnipotent czar in charge of housekeeping the whole shebang. But a top level structure must be of this kind in order to maintain a standardized quality of the outermost visible pages.

• The Web was specifically invented to avoid the need for a centralized location of electronic documents and the need of an omnipotent czar in charge of housekeeping the whole shebang. But a top level structure must be of this kind in order to maintain a standardized quality of the outermost visible pages.

• I propose that that all public pages are under the management responsibility of the Web group, while at some point, within the internal pages level, this responsibility ends (to be decided where…) and single individuals can keep their web pages wherever they like.

Sounds reasonable, but...

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• The first problem (the most important one), is that a site with pages spread out around the world makes an automatic search engine a nightmare to setup up.

Loose definition of pages at lower levels (2)

• but we want such an engine! As the site tree grows larger over the years it will become quickly unmanageable by anyone. Finding a document could soon become a nightmare.

• This brings to the limelight the issue of site indexing: commercial tools exist but efficiency, reliability and user friendliness need to be investigated.• Site indexing is only part of the solution: many pages will be the created on the fly by various kinds of scripts, getting data either from DAQ or from databases (the WEB group should share discussions in this topic with the database group). These pages are indexed by definition: the missing piece is a common mode of access between different scripts with different user graphical interfaces.

The definition of the lower level site tree is therefore still an open issue, with non trivial implication in maintenance and indexing

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• Traditional approach to develop a template web site is by hand; use an editor, learn HTML, JavaScript, paste all together and, voilà , you’re all set with a reasonably well looking web page.

Strategy to develop a template (1)

Good for quick and dirt deployment, but bad for look-and-feel Good for quick and dirt deployment, but bad for look-and-feel

• Reasons are: Maintain a consistent look-and-feel across several dozen (hundreds?) of pages quickly becomes unfeasible. Many useful visual tricks that greatly enhance a web site from the point of view of the user require non trivial HTML syntax or even JavaScript snippets of code. Tools that generate such code in a wysiwyg fashion are preferable in such case. Cascading style sheets are the tool of the trade in such cases, but again, these templates are very well generated by tools such as Dreamweaver, and more difficult to define an maintain by hand.

19 September 2001Dario Menasce: A proposal For The

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Strategy to develop a template (2)

Pro Con

Edit, develop and maintain pages by hand

• Easy to do (but only at very early stages and for not too complex look-and-feel)

• No specific (and expensive) tool required

• Information can be gathered and posted with simple cut and paste. Just a question of loosely adhering to HTML syntax

• Difficult to modify: no wysiwig feedback to check the final appearance. Modify pages in current use makes debugging cumbersome (possible break of service)

• No syntax or portability checks: IE and Netscape accept slightly different implementations of HTML and JavaScript statements

My guess is that higher level pages should be produced ANDmaintained by means of a professional tool , while lower level

pages it’s probably safer and easier to implement by hand

My guess is that higher level pages should be produced ANDmaintained by means of a professional tool , while lower level

pages it’s probably safer and easier to implement by hand

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Discussion about tools of the trade

I tried out several HTML editors, but the best, by far, turns outto be Dreamweaver by Macromedia (http://www.macromedia.com)

The power of this tool is vastly enhanced in conjunction with Flash,Fireworks (also by Macromedia) and Photoshop (by Adobe).

What did I learn?• Very powerful. What I like most is that you immediately see the layout you’re working on.

• A complex set of pages, with a high degree of entanglement are easily managed from within the same interface. Speeds up development significantly.

• I found questionable the use of this tool in conjunction with Perl scripts and the like, whereby the script itself is supposed to generate a page on the fly. This is likely due to my poor knowledge of the more sophisticated features of this tool. Again, inner pages are better managed and developed by hand.

Check out http://sgimida.mi.infn.it/~menasce/BTeV/index.htm

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Static vs dynamic pages: database and languages issues

Most of the more useful internal pages will be generated on the fly by some script getting input from user via web form, gathering data from a database and generating some HTML formatted report on the browser.

Issues:• What language for the scripts?• What DBMS at the root? A single database for all applications, or each group makes his choice? Many information could potentially be unnecessarily replicated in many places and getting out of sync. (discussion with the database group)

• For the public pages we probably need sort of a tutorial for the general

public concerning the physics we do (what is CP, what is Beauty etc…) Probably the best we can do is some snazzy Shockwave or Flash animation trying to convey difficult concepts with the aid of visual cartoons (see the Particle Adventure by the PDG group)

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Responsibility sharing (Web mastership and dependencies…)

It is important that responsibilities are defined in such a way to prevent accidental posting of embarrassing documents or unapproved results from links originating within the official site.

It has already been agreed upon that a selected list of web masters willbe in charge of the top layer of the site hierarchy. What is important atthis stage is that a well defined criteria to approve posting is also defined(voting by the collaboration? approval by spokespersons? …)

Internal pages will also have a two layer structure:• entry points to select arguments (memos, software, online monitoring..)• specific documents or specific subdirectories

Web master’s responsibilityWeb master’s responsibility

Single user’s responsibilitySingle user’s responsibility

An issue to take into account is whether we allow user’s to write theirown scripts with write privilege to databases to be served on the WEB:should someone run a bugged code, an entire database might be left inshambles. Policies must be established for such circumstances too.

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A practical example (template) to start discussion

In order to test the possibilities of the Macromedia suite of products, Itried to build a prototype of a home site for BTeV. Please check it out:

http://sgimida.mi.infn.it/~menasce/BTeV/index.htm

The purpose of this template is to kick off a discussion (based on a workingexample) about the following issues:

• Is the proposed breakdown of the hierarchy correctly carried out?• Is the navigation of the site made easier by the bi-dimensional coordinate system or a better approach exist? • What about graphics elements? Colors? Backgrounds?• We need at some point a set of pages with description of what we do in BTeV, ranging from pages intended to be avidly read by high school juniors to more seasoned citizens up to fellow scientists of other disciplines. These pages must be the most ‘captivating’ of the whole site. I put examples taken from BaBar and LHCB (see under )

At any rate, please feedback!please feedback!