The GNU Operating System

GNU is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2007; unfortunately, the “ideas” link on Google's site points to this page, instead of the correct gnu.org/software/soc-projects/ideas.html. Until we can get the link corrected, please just go to the above page. (Of course, if you'd like to help us with www.gnu.org, per the tasks below, that is welcome too.)

Tasks to do for www.gnu.org

Here are many possible tasks for improving the GNU web pages. If you would like to help with one of them, please e-mail <webmasters@gnu.org> BEFORE you do any work on them.

Accessibility

Investigate how www.gnu.org could provide better accessibility to all regardless of disability.

• A good place to start is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
• Other resources on and off the web could also be checked.
• People at or near MIT could check with MIT's Adaptive Technology for Information and Computing in person.
• People who have access to similar centers at other schools, organizations, and companies could check with them.
• Disabled users of the web could also be interviewed, and perhaps even added to the webmasters team for this task and others.
• A good online service for testing pages is WebXACT.

Site Scripting

• Improve the existing ht://dig search facility and/or install additional search facilities for the FSF/GNU web site.
• Set up manual indexing using the system proposed by Miloslav Nic. See the email exchange for more details on what is to be done.
• Find a way that the fp:/gd/gnuorg/EventAndTravelInfo/announce-events.plx script can make it so that our What's New page can list new events when they are added. One simple way to do this is to have it simply email webmasters every time a new event is added, and ask them to add it manually.
• in directory /fun/ include
  • cgi-bin scripts that
    • conduct a dialog with GNU Emacs's doctor.el and convert it into HTML.
    • get a zippyism from GNU Emacs's yow.el and convert it into HTML.
    • feed zippyisms to GNU Emacs's doctor and convert it into HTML.

    Roland McGrath has done some of this on his home pages. Ask him if you can copy his work over to http://www.gnu.org.

Format Conversions

• Turn the GPL FAQ from an HTML document into a canonical XML format, that we can easily generate HTML from. One possibility would be to use DocBook, since it has some tags for handling FAQ lists. (This task is currently awaiting someone to add <qanda> tag support in the DocBook to Texinfo translators.)
• We are looking for people to volunteer to convert documentation from various formats to the Texinfo format. This is something we need occasionally. We would like to have a list of people we could ask on these occasions. If you want to volunteer, please send mail to <gvc@gnu.org>.
• Rewrite the various philosophy pages and bulletins in Texinfo and convert to HTML using texi2html. They could then be easily included in:
  • the /gnu/GNUinfo subdirectory of ftp.gnu.org
  • the etc/ subdirectory of the GNU Emacs distribution
  • in the GNU system's Info tree
  • other useful locations.

Writing Web Pages

• Write web pages for GNU programs that lacks web pages on our server or whose web pages are obsolete using our software boilerplate as a template. Also read our software page standards.
• Work on improving our sitemap.
  • Design a better sitemap that helps people find all places on the website easily. The sitemap should highlight particularly important parts of sub-pages. (For example, the philosophy listing on the site map should have under it links to some particularly useful essays on the philosophy page).
  • Come up with several different ways of presenting the sitemap, that consider both the differences in
    • how people perceive web pages, and
    • how people use the site.
  • Also, the idea of creating a programatically generated sitemap has been proposed; this would primarily be a tool to aid in writing by hand a more easily navigated sitemap.

Graphics

• Remove JPEG artifacts from all PNG pictures. You do this by removing "loose" pixels and turning them into 1bpp (in case of black/white drawings).
• Create new graphics for our web pages. We mostly want to have nicer drawings like the ones we already have and perhaps in more colors.

Validation and Broken Links

• Check all the web pages for well formedness, consistency with our HTML style sheet, and webmaster guidelines. All web pages need to be valid to their specific DTD, (the W3C Validator is a good place to start).
• Help is needed repairing broken links. There are numerous symlinks, so please do not break these in your repair efforts. Time and care is needed to track down broken links, and in most cases find suitable replacements. Please ensure that our linking policy is followed in finding replacements.

Localization

Help translate GNU web pages from English into other languages. You can either join an existing translation team, or form a new one. Check the existing translation teams.

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