About the WRI website
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This page contains three main parts. Part one explains the mission, structure, and maintenance of the site. Part two gives more details on the site's technical side, for those who might be interested in that sort of thing. Finally, this page gives updates on changes to the site's structure (changes to content are found on the What's New page [new articles during the past two months] or the What's New RSS feed [25 most recent articles]).
We welcome feedback at any time. Please write the website facilitator directly at ksimons at interlog.com (please be aware that I am based in Canada while the WRI international office is based in Britain; it often takes some time for us to compare notes and feedback).
What our site aims to do
The War Resisters' International website started out as an online promotional leaflet for the 1998 Triennial Conference in Porec, Croatia. From the very beginning, it included material in all four official WRI languages -- English, French, German and Spanish. The site was designed so that each language version could stand separately and would have its own index page.
As more material arrived -- such as the 1997 Prisoners for Peace list and accompanying articles -- we incorporated these additional resources into the site. At the Triennial itself, an online resources project, incorporating the full range of WRI information resources, was approved in principle.
During the March-June 1999 war over Kosovo/a, we added a page where we posted statements, letters, appeals, and articles from our partners in the region and elsewhere. Because of the nature of WRI's engagement in former-Yugoslavia -- from the late 1980s to the present day -- our resources went far beyond the more predictable commentaries on the war which were found elsewhere on the Web. We continued this effort during the post-11 September 2001 resurgence in militarism (and the 2003 war in Iraq), expanding our online resources with material in languages as diverse as Basque, Polish, and Korean.
Management
The site has been maintained on a volunteer basis, with support from the office and from international members of WRI (elected and otherwise) who forward information and translations for the website, together with words of encouragement.
The "traditional" part of the WRI website is a managed site -- that is, we do not use a content management system (and in fact do not use article databases at all, except for the offline generation of articles). There is webmaster and/or staff intervention both in posting and in link creation for new items. Our experience has taught us that this is a more useful model for a large multilingual website -- even Wikipedia requires some administrative intervention to create language links -- and also for a site where documents have some official significance for the organisation. On the other hand, there is a large degree of self-management on other parts of the website, in particular on mailing list-driven pages such as CO-Alerts and News from the Network, and on the WRI Wiki.
Archiving
Most of WRI's publications have a high archival value, even if (or often because) the information contained within them is out-of-date and no longer necessary for campaigning purposes. We keep the vast majority of our web pages online, in some cases moving them to our secondary server at archive.wri-irg.org and in a few cases updating or modifying contact information within particular pages. But we do not routinely check old web and email links for validity; if you click an external link on an old page, don't count on it working.
The CO Alerts page is archived at the end of every year. We keep the individual files online because they have legal and political significance even after a particular CO is released from prison, but the CO Alerts index at wri-irg.org/news/alerts generally reflects only the current CO cases.
Some purely functional pages are deleted from the server once their purpose is served: in particular, job advertisements; conference registration forms; and some conference information sheets. We also keep only the most current addresses of our affiliate organisations on the database-driven affiliates' list page.
About languages
The switch to a new domain at wri-irg.org in March 2001 gave us an opportunity to be more language-neutral in our root page (http://wri-irg.org/index.html). The four official WRI languages appear equally on this page, which is a gateway to the homepages for each language version.
We have more material in English than in the other three official WRI languages. This is not ideal, but we do our best to make a wide range of resources available in French, German, and Spanish -- and in other languages where WRI has arranged translations of important documents (as in some of our Russian, Hebrew, Turkish, and Korean material on conscientious objection) or where local WRI members have done translations for their own use and sent them on to us (as in our 11 September and Iraq war material).
The site is structured to allow users to switch languages easily, either by using the separate language homepages as a hub or by selecting translations of a particular document from the left-hand menu. Users can also monitor our performance with translations through the multilingual What's New page, which lists new material by date and also indicates the language of each article.
Technical notes
Stylesheets
Starting in mid-2004, we have introduced printer-friendly stylesheets to our newer files and to the whole Refusing to Bear Arms sub-site. One effect of these sheets (which are invoked automatically when you print from any post-1999 browser) is that the printed version of a given page is not identical to the screen version; most importantly, navigation bars are removed and the main content goes all the way across the page. Headlines are reduced in size but are still a few points larger than body type. Photos and logos are retained.
In general, print-enabled HTML pages are shorter in length than their PDF equivalents (thanks to smaller font sizes). If you experience problems with printing these pages, an alternative printing solution is to save the file as HTML and import it into your word processor program.
Scaleable vector graphics (SVG)
Scaleable vector graphics have been introduced in a few places on the website -- on the downloadable resources page and as the downloads on the 2006 Triennial page. The great advantage of SVG is that both screen and print resolutions can be very high; the disadvantage is that the Mozilla browsers (and, by extension, nearly all Linux browsers) no longer support the Adobe SVG plugin, which is why we have discontinued using embedded SVG for Broken Rifle mastheads. Firefox and Opera have limited support for SVG since version 1.5, but do not provide any context menu (right-click) controls. These browsers are also less suitable for embedded SVG images than versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer using the Adobe plug-in, often rendering them as inline frames and/or with degraded graphics and colours.
We do encourage WRI activists to re-use the broken rifle and Triennial graphics which are available in SVG. There are a range of open-source SVG editors including the multi-platform Inkscape (used by the WRI office and webmaster). Newer graphics programs, and some desktop publishing programs such as the open-source Scribus, now also allow the import of SVG files.
RSS feeds
RSS is a method for generating a dynamic list of links to material in a particular part of a website. The WRI site uses two main tools for generating RSS feeds: mHonArc (which is also used to convert our mailing lists to standard HTML) and RSSgenr8 (a Perl script which creates an RSS feed based on tagged links on a particular webpage -- for example the Broken Rifle index page).
The WRI website's RSS feeds do not provide new content to the site, but rather provide an alternative way of getting existing content. Because RSS feeds (and the pages they link to) can be read in several common email programs, users are able to check for updates to the WRI website as they check their mail.
There are many tools for checking RSS feeds from within an internet browser program. WRI's feeds work best with mail programs and integrated browsers such as Thunderbird, Netscape, and Opera; browser plugins such as Sage and Pluck; and freestanding RSS readers (of which there are many). They can also be imported into the Firefox browser as "live bookmarks" or viewed directly as XML. There is also a script on the WRI site (at http://wri-irg.org/site/magpie/scripts/magpie_radio.php) which allows feeds to be viewed as plain HTML.
PDF Help
Issues of the Broken Rifle, some major reports, and some campaigning materials are offered both in HTML and in Portable Document Format (PDF). The PDF files are generally more useful for those who wish to print and distribute their own copies of these documents, or for those who prefer this document format for on-screen reading.
The most common program for reading (and printing) PDF files is Adobe Reader, a proprietary program.
Adobe Reader can be downloaded for free for Macintosh, Windows, Linux, Palm, and other OS's at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.
There are several alternative PDF viewers which you can use in place of Acrobat. You can see a full list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software or try the following:
- Ghostscript/Ghostview is an open-source viewer and editor for any Postscript or PDF-based file. The setup routine is fairly complicated, however. The most user-friendly Linux interface is called GV http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gv/gv.htm; for Windows 32-bit, a version called GSView http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/get46.htm is available.
- Xpdf is an open-source viewer specifically for PDF. It is included in most Linux distributions, and is compatible with other operating systems which use X-Window. http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/
- Sumatra PDF [http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/] is an open-source viewer for Windows which is based on Xpdf. It is a single executable file without dependent libraries, and can be run off a USB key.
- Mac OSX (10.2+) opens PDF and other Postscript files by default in its own Preview program, which has limited functionality but is a fast viewing platform.
While WRI's PDF files are normally backward-compatible with older versions of Acrobat Reader, and with the non-proprietary viewers mentioned above, we at times use embedded fonts for non-Latin scripts; these may not work on all systems.
Backward compatibility
Wherever possible, we design pages to degrade gently to simpler types of display or to simpler versions of HTML. The following table (viewable as a list in text-only browsers) shows how this is done.
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Testing notes
Pages are edited in NoteTab Light, a freeware editor which incorporates the standard 'HTML Tidy' code checker. Pages are generally uploaded with PowerHTML, another freeware program which allows for easy auto-updating of files across fairly large sites.
Pages are now composed on a PC with a 1800Mhz Athlon processor running Windows ME. Pages are normally tested first on Internet Explorer 6.0, Mozilla Firefox 2.0x, and Mozilla Seamonkey 1.0x; the site as a whole has also been tested on Opera 5.x and 8.x; Safari 1.x, Explorer 5.0 and ICab 3.x (on Mac Classic); Plucker and Web Pro (stylesheet-free, for the Palm handheld); Explorer CE (stylesheet-free, for HP factor handhelds) and Dillo/GLinks/Lynx (also stylesheet-free, for Linux).
Pages are tested on one of the primary programs (Mozilla or Explorer) after every upload, mainly to ensure valid crosslinking but also to check on loading speed.
Internal and external links are checked every two months or so with the W3 Consortium's Link Checker (http://validator.w3.org/checklink) .
Updates on site design and architecture
February 2006: Re-generated most of the website's static content from offline databases, in order to harmonise stylesheet usage and eliminate the last vestiges of deprecated layout styles. Some non-standard formatting may have been lost from some pages as a result.
October 2005: Introduced RSS feeds for a number of regularly updated pages. Added a gateway page to familiarise WRI members with restricted areas of the website. Added the PHP-based chat script ARSC (A Really Simple Chat) for online meetings.
September 2005: Introduced a client-side menu, based on styleswitcher.js, to choose stylesheets. This will gradually replace the previous Javascript selector which assigned stylesheets depending on the user's browser type.
July 2005: Introduced two server-side scripts to automatically generate pages and indexes (at http://wri-irg.org/news/network and http://wri-irg.org/news/alerts) from mailing list output.
November 2004: Added stylesheets for print media; newer files will print without side navigation bars and with smaller, monochromatic headings, allowing for more efficient use of paper. The on-screen display of these pages will not be affected.
October 2004: Added resources page with downloadable broken rifle graphics (including Scalable Vector Graphics -- SVG) and language versions of the WRI declaration.
September 2004: New Spanish homepage, following same structure as the English and German homepages.
January-February 2004: Switchover to unframed layout, using CSS1 and 2 standards with backward compatibility. New categories have replaced the old toolbars on the English and German homepages.
November 2003: WRI webshop goes online.
March 2003: Added first page in a non-Roman script (Japanese). Non-Roman pages will be viewable only on platforms which allow full Unicode display -- Windows 2000, Mac OS X, Linux kernel 2.3x and later, or Win 98/Mac OS 9 with optional font packs. Subsequently we have had pages in Russian, Greek, and Korean, but have had to present Hebrew in PDF, rather than HTML, because of directional issues.
January 2003: Modified cascading stylesheets (CSS) to give relative, rather than absolute, type sizes. This should improve the pages' cross-platform appearance and readability, at the expense of making font scaling (for instance, in H1 to H6 headline styles, and in the page headers and footers) less subtle.
November 2002: Added "conscientious objection" as a toolbar category. Modified the German homepage to make it more similar to the English version. Began accepting online donations via spendenportal.de.
June 2002: Replaced old links page 'wrilinks.htm' with a dynamic page at cgi/datafeed-websort.cgi. This means that affiliates' addresses are identical and up-to-date both on the links page and on the main WRI address list.
May 2002: Introduced a sendmail-based mailer for general correspondence, with an eye to replacing mailto: links and reducing the volume of spam being sent to the office and webmaster.
Replaced buggy Javascript scroll on splash page with a simple inline-frame presentation of the WRI declaration in four languages (four small files which refresh one another in rotation).
December 2001: Introduction of a style-sheet-based header to identify/link files within particular subject areas (the Dealing with the Past and Right to Refuse to Kill projects and the 2002 Triennial). This is an alternative to the inline frames used on some other groups of pages and will hopefully supplant them.
October 2001: In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the USA and the military retaliation, the WRI statement/pledge has been translated into additional languages. A technical implication of this has been the need to offer text support for Latin-based alphabets outside the "Latin-1" world. We have so far included one page with Turkish (Latin-9) encoding and one other with Eastern European (Latin-2) partial support for Macedonian (Latin). Not all browsers/operating systems will support these encodings; Opera, for example, only permits one character set to be used at a time.
September 2001: A freeware code checker, HTML-Tidy, is used on new pages to ensure coding accuracy.
August 2001: The CO-Alerts mailing list is now available (and will be archived) on-site thanks to Newsadmin, a Perl script. While not able to archive directly from the mailed list, the script ensures that these alerts arrive at the website promptly; they can also be updated remotely by the project worker and/or site administrator.
July 2001: Launch of password-protected sub-site, the Conscription and Conscientious Objection Documentation Project's report Refusing to Bear Arms -- 177 individual country reports accessed from a separate frameset, with registration and page-update forms (running off the Matt's Script Archive formmail script).
March-May 2001: Launch of new domain name at wri-irg.org. Introduction of a four-language "splash" page at home.html [this may seem unnecessary to some visitors but serves the dual purpose of being language-neutral and allowing for better search engine indexing for the entire site].
Addition of a CGI search engine. There are some changes in the organisation of the site, which now divides files into four main types: programme, news, events, and documents. "Programme" includes CO work, nonviolence and social empowerment, former-Yugoslavia, and the WRI Women's Working Group, while "news" includes the Broken Rifle, WRI Women, and online monographs. "Events" includes seminars and Triennial conferences; while "Documents" covers statements, organisational papers, and general information. This organisational hierarchy is reflected in the general and language-specific sitemaps, but not in the directory tree (which, for ease of organisation and navigation, is designed to go a maximum of two levels below the root level).
Designed new CGI script for generating an updated list of affiliates; this will replace the static list for all four language versions.
February 2001: Extensive reorganisation of files. Homepages for CO work, the Broken Rifle, and former-Yugoslavia have moved to the top level. Deleted redundant files from the 1998 Triennial (information also contained on the Triennial report page) and introduced a new tertiary-level directory for the event. The Triennial homepage (events.htm in the top-level directory) is now designed to point to either the 1998 or 2001 Triennials. Both the Triennial and former-Yugoslav index pages now have inline/Javascript translation indices.
January 2001: As a first step to wider site reorganisation, the Nonviolence and Social Empowerment email list archive has been moved to a new secondary-level directory called "nvse", which will also hold conference papers and reports following the NVSE conference in Puri. The nvse directory also has an experimental menu system using inline frames (degrading in older browsers to a list of text links) which is intended to be used consistently throughout the new directory. The goal is to reduce the number of internal links on individual pages and to simplify both navigation and updating.
mid-Nov 1999: Created archive directories for urgent actions and news (including the English version of the Prisoners for Peace list). This should have no visible effect on navigation but helps tidy up the directory tree.
early Nov 1999: Added Javascript date-stamp function to the "What's New?" page. This means that non-Javascript compatible browsers won't see an update at all (but you can work it out from the dates on individual file entries).
September 1998: With the end of the WRI Triennial, the site begins its transition to a comprehensive general WRI information resource. At this stage there are approximately 80 individual pages on the site.
December 1997: WRI website launched as gn.apc.org/warresisters, with four-language information about the forthcoming WRI Triennial in Croatia.
wri-irg.org