[Bese-devel] New tutorial typos

[szergling]

Hi Drew & everyone,

I've been reading the UCW source code (on/off), trying out/running
examples but haven't had much success understanding the ins and
outs. Perhaps one really have to dive in and write something big to
gain an appreciation of the various concepts. I have however had
slightly better success trying out Seaside, then returning to read the
UCW source. I'm still new to all this though, so the new tutorial at

http://common-lisp.net/project/ucw/repos/ucw-core/manual/getting-started.txt

was very helpful. Finally!

Anyway, in reading through it, I found many typos. I have attached a
diff of various corrections to the tutorial, but haven't made any
other changes aside from very very minor rewording & text
reflow/fill-paragraph. Perhaps a good thing to do might be to do a
spell-check occasionally?

Some additional comments about the diff:

----------

In the lines at 260 at 290, I am not sure about my fixes to the
following:

-  (<:style ".message {font-size:2em;font-weight:bold"))
+  (<:style ".message {font-size:2em;font-weight:bold}"))

----------

M-x untabify? This is a tabs vs no tabs issue, either way, I'm not too
concerned.

----------

How many dots in ellipses? Two or three? I started correcting many to show 3
dots... but it seems the tutorial is quite consistent in using 2 dots...

..  --> ...

----------

Often, when I make a correction, M-q would reflow/refill many
subsequent lines, so the diff can be a bit hard to read that
way. Apologies in advance -- perhaps I shouldn't have refilled.

----------

Some further questions:

In the YACLML section,

*** YACLML: Yet another common lisp markup language.

(defun render-message-form (name)
  (<:form
   (<:as-html "Enter a new message:")
   (<:input
    :type "text" :name (string-downcase name))
   (<:submit)))

What does the form submit to? That is, what gets generated in the
<form> html tag?  <form action='??' action='??'>

Perhaps a short digression, with some examples of interactions at the
REPL with YaCLML, could be helpful?

----------

*** Frames, Actions, Callbacks.

"A frame represents an individual hit, a page rendered... an
interaction with the application."

I still don't understand what a frame is. It doesn't seem to be
visible to a UCW user, so perhaps it should come later, since it
describes UCW internals? That is, show what the user would write
first, then show what the written code does behind the scenes.

What's the difference between an action and a callback? How does an
action compare to a simple defmethod (or defmethod/cc)? It seems
actions and callbacks can be unified to be the same thing (lambda's or
generic functions)

----------

Which primitive control operation does the paragraph at 500 refer to?

"Also, a FRAME can contain a top level WINDOW-COMPONENT. If it exists,
the RENDER method will be called on it. We can use this to create the
primitive control flow operator i mentioned earler[sic]."

----------

Finally, I also have a correction to the webpage on

http://common-lisp.net/project/ucw/documentation.html

see the following section:

---

Far More than You Ever Wanted to Know

A long e-mail conversation which touches on, among other things, UCW
internals, the REST approach and continuations vs. state machines.

Another long <<<e-mail>>> which talks about how to structure UCW apps.

---

The <<<e-mail>>> here links to:

http://common-lisp.net/pipermail/bese-devel/2004-December/000222.html

Perhaps the intended link is to:

http://common-lisp.net/pipermail/bese-devel/2004-December/000221.html


I have not finished reading the tutorials yet, but thought I should
send off the typos I found ASAP anyway. Thanks for the good work. Look
forward to more in the future, and happy hacking!
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