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If you have a well structured opinion about how to improve the learning of Frontier and you want to publish it here, please, drop me an email. Thanks.
-Emmanuel
Greg Hanek ghanek@indiana.edu
A taxonomy is an effort to classify something, or organize related things into clear categories. This is an attempt to more clearly describe the various kinds of Newbies that exist within the Frontier community.
This should not be accepted as perfect, or as some form of gospel. This is how I personally see the various levels of Newbie-dom that can occur while using Frontier. This taxonomy does not claim to fit every person who uses Frontier, (just as the taxonomy of the animal kingdom does not cleanly define the place for the platypus, for instance) but I think this does a reasonable job, and I haven't seen anything better. Yet :-). So, some folks may not follow this path when using Frontier, but I think a large enough number do to make this a valid attempt.
I welcome your feedback on making this taxonomy more accurate, representative of reality, and so on. Here is my own vision of a Frontier Newbie Taxonomy:
Level One Newbie -- Learning to drive
The most basic level of Newbie is the person who has just downloaded their first copy of Frontier, and is interested in finding out what its capabilities are (eventually), some of the vocabulary that it uses, and a tour of what it really needed to begin to use it. Appropriate documents would answer the question "What are the very basics I need to begin to play with Frontier?" Ideal documents would cover just the basics needed (with lots of examples!), along with some "nice to know" information. Key rule for this level: "Tell me what I need to know, when I need to know it." Don't think the Level One Newbies need to have a complete reference for Frontier right from the start. [That's what The Book is for, anyway :-) ] What can be much more valuable is some form of a stripped-down Quick-Start guide, instead.
Level Two Newbie -- Making simple Web pages
The next level might be the person who wants to create a simple web site, since they've heard Frontier is well suited for managing web SITES, not just making web pages. A slight variation on this is someone wanting to create a Typical Frontier Website consisting of the nested tables, and using some pre-existing macro to make the cool navigation menu on their pages. Matt's Typical Frontier Website and Andy Sylvester's Building Standard Websites tutorial (both also have source code to be used, picked apart, and digested) together do the trick quite nicely. The Level Two Newbie should be familiar with HTML authoring already, at least the most common parts.
Level Three Newbie -- Making customized Web pages
The next level may be someone interested in basic scripting, so they can customize their website. Matt's Scripting Tutorial is rather nice, but there is a documentation hole when the possibility of performing some of the often asked website customizing Q's arises. These gaps are being filled in slowly, but a more complete reference source (one-stop-shopping) doesn't exist yet. [FTN may help fill this hole!] Topics you might see here include using Meta tags, javascript, image handling (beyond what the default imageref macro provides), and incorporating files that are not kept in the Frontier root, just to name a few.
Level Four Newbie -- Frontier + Other Apps = Magic()
The next level of Newbie might be the person interested in heavier scripting, interacting with some other apps, like creating a random signature generator for Eudora, automating Filemaker Pro, and so on. There is not a lot of information available here. (outside of The Book, and comments in other scripts) Related to this is my plea to those who share their scripts, "Please don't be afraid to liberally comment your code!" Even if _you_ think it may not need a comment, many of us who are new to the process DO appreciate the comments. I'd much rather read some code and a "I already know that" comment, than to scratch my head for hours trying to figure out what is happening.
Level Five Newbie -- Not really a Newbie, anymore!
The final level might be the person who wants to share their own scripts with others. This person might be interested in finding information about setting up Fat Pages or Mimi pages, and how to write a more generic script or suite (so about all that an end-user needs to do is change a pathname), but is pretty well-versed in Usertalk and Frontier. This would be a good place to stop using the Newbie moniker, as anyone capable of doing this is really NOT a Newbie, as the term is more often defined. This person may be interested in some clever tricks or accepted ways of doing things within the community, or while scripting. For instance, Emmanuel shared the following thought about this level, and about a person's desire to perhaps know more about "style coding to be able to share more easily the script (for example, it took me a while when I started with Frontier to figure out that in UserLand code, ix was "index", ct was "count", adrObject was the name of a variable with an address in it and so on, but now its more easier for me to read their code)." This is precisely the sort of thing that is important to someone at this level, using some of the Frontier community conventions in the scripts they share.
The story behind this taxonomy
This is a rather-edited version of a message I sent to the group that was working on Emmanuel's Frontier Newbie Toolbox site. I had been shocked by Dave Winer's message on the Community mailing list about a Newbie being someone who was interested in sharing their scripts with others. Initially, this did not sit well with me, and I was tempted to respond immediately, thinking Dave had really missed the target. I resisted that flaming urge, and instead, began thinking about the various types of Newbie one can be with Frontier. Slowly I realized that Dave was right, in some respect, and that there was no single definition of a Frontier Newbie. My thoughts were finally committed to actual electrons when Emmanuel asked for help on his web site.
I consider myself too Frontier-impaired to contribute much to the community in the way of scripts or tutorials. I do believe that I can give back something by commenting on where I see gaps in what does exist, or pointing out areas that might be improved, at least from a Newbie's viewpoint. I hope that this taxonomy creates a spark of some sort, that it generates some of the good dialog I have seen on the Frontier lists in the past three years, and that this lights a fire in some of the more talented folks in the Frontier community who are better able to fill in the holes that are pointed out. Now I'm going to go practice my "dereferencing mantra" some more. My thanks to Matt, Andy, Doug, Brent, John, Jeb, Seth, (and of course, Dave W.) and anyone else who has made my journey with Frontier a better one. Keep Diggin'!
Greg Hanek ghanek@indiana.edu Wed, 5 Aug 1998
Emmanuel M. Décarie emm@cam.org
Strangely, there are not very many well-organized online resources on learning UserTalk. True that the one we have are good, but they are scarce. There are only two that I think are suitable for the Frontier Newbie. Two of them are presented here, and the third is DocServer. I have to say that online resources on pure UserTalk are the poor relation of the Frontier tutorials.
It's true that you can find documentation about xml, regex, how to hook Frontier to an ODBC--but these are more advanced topics, when you have already grasped the basics of UserTalk.
I think this is caused by multiples factors.
First UserLand is really geared at developing new cool tools, and creating documentation on them (see the HowTos for example), but there is little investment in creating new documentation about pure UserTalk and directed toward the Frontier Newbie. So major efforts are directed on revamping and updating either old documentation on UserTalk (like the User's Manual), or documentation that was created for the 4.3.2 version of Frontier (the Scripting Tutorial based on Matt's work). From this perspective, DocServer is the exception. It was updated by Wesley Felter to include the toys verbs (verbs that were in the 4.2.3 version, but were not documented) and some html verbs (but not all of them). DocServer was also adapted to include the Windows world.
Maybe we don't have much on UserTalk because of the Frontier mailing lists. Those lists are invaluable tools, as they answers many fundamental questions on UserTalk. But they are comparable to an oral culture (I think it's Matt who first used this metaphor). Even if those lists are archived, they are less systematic than what an oral culture can do (remember the Odyssey was first transmitted orally).
Or maybe it's because we have now The Book. But I still think something is missing here. I'm still waiting for a good online tutorial that will explain more thoroughly deferencing, recursion, subroutines and what you can do with them. Even the Script Meridian wish list for new tutorials is in my opinion light on UserTalk. If UserLand doesn't take the lead, and if the Frontier community is not producing those online tools, the famous "Frontier learning curve", which I think is a falsity, is going to become a reality--mostly because of the scarcity of the online resources to learn it. That's a pity, because once you start mastering the basics of UserTalk, it's a lots of fun!
Emmanuel M. Décarie emm@cam.org 3 août 1998
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Dernière mise à jour: Mardi, le 22 juin 1999. http://scriptdigital.com/fnt/edito.html Produit sur Macintosh. Créé avec Frontier 5. |
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