[Sugar-devel] HTML 5 chapters for "Make Your Own Sugar Activities!"

[James Simmons]

Sai,

I agree with you that the Booki software in FLOSS Manuals isn't all it
could be. It's caused me a lot of frustration too. The good thing about it
is that it gives you a way to work in a Wiki where the content isn't
automatically published to the whole world. The public website is generated
from the Wiki as static pages. You only publish when the content is ready
to publish. You can also create PDFs in the sizes needed for book
publishing, plus EPUBs for e-books (which can be easily converted to Kindle
books). That is the brilliant thing about it. The page editing lacks a lot.
It is just as bad today as it was two years ago.

I use Open Office to create my published books other than my two FLOSS
Manuals. If you don't need to collaborate on the web it works very well.

I'm willing to deal with FM if somebody else creates the content. You can
paste HTML from other sources into FM if it is simple HTML without styles,
font tags, etc. I wrote a utility in Python using Beautiful Soup which
takes the HTML generated by a word processor and strips out the extra junk.
I use it to create e-books from Open Office documents.

As for a whole book on HTML 5 Activities, that might be a good idea but
what I had in mind was something on how to take an HTML 5 application and
put a Sugar Activity wrapper around it that can save and restore with the
Journal, maybe do some collaboration, etc. In MYOSA I have a chapter on
PyGame which doesn't actually teach you to use PyGame, but instead shows
you how to take a PyGame application and put an Activity wrapper around it
using sugargame. There are other good resources for learning PyGame and
HTML 5.

It sounds like we may have a Sugar specific HTML 5 library being developed
and that would be out of scope, other than pointing the reader to
information about it.

James Simmons



On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 10:56 AM, Sai Vineet <saivineet89 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Yes we need a Web Activity chapter. But a whole book would be probably
> nicer, since the whole method of development changes in Web Activities. Do
> we have docs for sugar-web? I haven't found any ... I think we should make
> a new book on Web Activities.
>
> Also I would like to say that editing books on FLOSS manuals is a pain. I
> tried doing it during GCI, but it didn't work in Chrome, and worked
> sometimes in Firefox but mostly not. I think that may be the reason for
> people not contributing much. It would be better if it's shifted somewhere
> else, maybe something like developer.sugarlabs.org?
>
> Regards,
> Vineet.
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 10:15 PM, James Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> During the 2012 Google code-in Lionel wrote a nice chapter for MYOSA on
>> making Activities using HTML 5 and WebKit. I have been slowly and steadily
>> updating the other chapters in the book to use Sugar 3 and GTK 3. I have
>> not updated the website with the latest changes because I don't want the
>> book to be in a half-done state, but I have been making steady progress.
>>
>> One thing I have noticed from lurking on this mailing list is that HTML 5
>> and Sugar have made a lot of progress since that chapter was written. I get
>> the impression that what is written there may already be obsolete. I also
>> feel that I'm not the guy who can fix that. I did a fair amount of Activity
>> development before writing MYOSA but I've drifted away from it since then.
>>
>> I believe that HTML 5 is going to be a big deal for Sugar and that MYOSA
>> needs to have some new or updated chapters to reflect that. I am hoping
>> that some of you might contribute this content.
>>
>> As for my own updates, some of them might be published in a couple of
>> weeks.
>>
>
> Nice!
>
>
>> Working on this book has been a rewarding experience for me. I consider
>> it part of my own Constructionist education. Since finishing it I have been
>> involved in writing or publishing many other books. I have transcribed
>> books for Project Gutenberg and Project Gutenberg Canada. I have scanned a
>> bunch of books for the Internet Archive, using a scanner I designed and
>> built myself. I updated a memoir of my days among the Hare Krishnas that
>> had been on a shelf for 30 years and published it, getting five star
>> reviews on Amazon. I have formatted for publishing a twelve volume
>> illustrated English edition of *The Mahabharata*, the great epic of
>> India. I have written a science fiction novel and am working on a second
>> one.
>>
>> I am not suggesting that contributing HTML 5 chapters to this book will
>> change your life. However, it definitely changed mine.
>>
>> James Simmons
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>
>>
>
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