Subject: Re: standardizing AstroWeb

From: [email-masked] (anton koekemoer)
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 94 11:27:16 EST

Dear friends,

Don writes:
> I agree with your general objective and agree that more
> standardization would tend to help achieve that objective, but I also
> believe that some of the diversity of styles is a good thing. We
> should discuss the pros and cons of standardization; there is no
> hurry. If the consensus favors more standardization, I will go along.

yes i also like the current diversity, and would like to keep our separate
category-sorted lists going (unless someone feels strongly that some of them
should be merged). That is part of the usefulness of AstroWeb, in that it caters
for a wide variety of tastes and is therefore likely to be useful to just about
everybody. So i have references to all of them on this example homepage.
...
> One basic strategy which I have used is to minimize the number of
> links which the user must click in order to find their target
> category. My top-level page is a table-of-contents...

that's certainly a drawback of having a single homepage summarizing pointers to
our different presentations. The advantage on the other hand is simply that of
summarizing them all on one page, giving something of a better perspective on
how they all relate together. For example, starting off at some of the
references to our pages on the net, it would take several key-clicks to arrive
at a searchable or protocol-sorted version. This would not be the case if these
references instead landed one at a standard homepage of this kind.
I see no clear-cut advantage of one approach over the other, except by general
consensus. So i'd also be happy to go with whatever the majority opinion is.

						cheers,
						 - anton.

> PS 
> ....  In addition to a picture, we
> might want to consider constructing an AstroWeb graphic logo, a > trademark...

i also like the van Gogh picture and am happy to keep it, while adding a second
logo to serve more as an identification trademark (something which can be
miniaturized and incorporated with links to our AstroWeb pages)
./