[Ur] New website?

[Adam Chlipala]

Thanks, Torstein, for taking the initiative on this sort of thing!

Some context for others: Torstein originally contacted me privately.  I 
responded that I'm indeed used to reading complaints about the design of 
the Ur project site, but that's it's never been clear to me what the 
defensible essence of the complaints is.  To me, the current site looks 
just fine and seems efficient to use to find the information that 
visitors will come looking for. Torstein's point about the difficulty of 
bookmarking with frames is one I hadn't thought of before, so it forms 
the only objective objection that I'm aware of now.

However, I may be out of touch with the psychology of today's 
developers.  I see it as a feature, not a bug, to turn away "the average 
programmer," who probably will find the cognitive "ticket price" of 
Ur/Web to be too high, but I don't want to turn away potential 
productive users.

So, I asked Torstein to send his suggestion to this mailing list. I'm 
genuinely interested in thoughts from the current Ur community, which 
will naturally be biased toward those who weren't turned away by the 
current or past designs, but who may still have some useful insights.  
In case anyone is worried about simple "me too"-ism in bogging down this 
mailing list with one-line messages of agreement or disagreement, I'd be 
happy to receive thoughts in messages addressed only to me.

On 07/15/2015 09:11 AM, Torstein Saltvedt wrote:
> I would be happy to implement it - but if so I'd like to use a static 
> site generator and host it using GitHub pages. There are some 
> technical things to consider if so, especially regarding the demos.

Actually, this would be an opportunity to address another common 
complaint, that the web site for a web framework should be implemented 
with that same framework.  I'd lean toward creating an Ur/Web app, in 
place of using some other static site generator.

> Would it be out of the question to move the project over to GitHub? It 
> would make the Ur/Web project a lot more accessible to other developers.

I'm seriously considering moving to GitHub in the near future.  I'll be 
interested if anyone has any reasons to propose for _not_ switching from 
Mercurial to Git and GitHub.