ProfWork 11.4 | Interlaced ToolKit

Summary: Design ITK 4.0 and DOM to support Learning Machine for Laudato Si' project.

LSi Home | Support | LSi Build > LSi Site Structure

Background: Since my Inside America course used JavaScript to roll out pages based on user prompts around 1998, I have designed my web sites as software for the presentation and learning of the project at hand. This includes site designs for Public Policy Cycle and for World Sustainability, both as an online offerings. Also, I had provided a precursor to the commentary on Laudato Si': a synopsis and supporting notes for Amy Goodman's The Story of Stuff for my Ecology, Economics and Ethics upper level course.

In this spirit and with this intention, I will build the Laudato Si' Project around tools provided by HTML5 that facilitate more complex web pages. The typeface and styles ease eyestrain, but the pages can be printed as well. The internal and external links will connect cocncepts, data claims, and interconnected portions of the site. The site maintenance should be easier as well.

Introduction and Mission of ITK

The Laudato Si' Project needs a consistent look and feel for a user-oriented site. The site structure provides the framework for a readerly presentation:

  1. Introduction: Background, context, mission, preface, introduction
  2. Oikos: Our Common Home, Oikos, Anthropocene, social and Earth history, WSE & SE
  3. Crisis: Ecological Crisis, Integral Ecology, EJ, Technosphere
  4. Renewal: Action, Threefolding, GTN, Sachs, education, spirituality, Noosphere, PP
  5. Support: endnotes, glossary resources, works cited

The concepts used to explain and to expand Laudato Si' are presented throughout the directories, so the task of the coherent presentation of the supporting material requires that the concepts and support data be interlaced into a semantic web of meaning. The key terms to achieve this are:

  1. Learning Machine (LM): A metaphor for a highly responsive web site that rapidly adapts to the user's learning style through a coherent set of links to internal articles and annotated external sites. A reference page and, in effect, a glossary provide a summary of the links.
  2. Interlaced ToolKit (ITK): A quick and easily navigated web of clearly articulated concepts, supporting sites, and data that extend and amplify Laudato Si'.
  3. The consistent Document Object Model (DOM): The user and the browser serving the user renders the web page, such as that you are now reading, in a particular look and feel. Consistent presentation informs the reader and pleases the browser with up to date code written in HTML5 format. (Look at the code underneath this page. The shortcut for Chrome browsers and the industry standard is ^-U, simultaneously pressing the control key and the U key.) The DOM method I will use appears just below this section.

Learning Machine ITK Build Process ^

RAD = LSI Survey built into directories + ITK glossary. ITK = Interlaced (conceptual, factual) ToolKit that defines what Sustainers need for Re-inhabitation WeltBild. So, within the site structure, above, chunks of meaning and data will be interconnected, elaborated with chunks and links, and validated with sources. The goal, as look and feel below, is to provide the user software app to access LSi and PPW coherently, clearly, and completely.

Key to RAD, LM demands tight, interlaced, responsive design within flat design of short, lively pages written tightly around a single article tag with no extraneous verbiage and copious linkages. Main elements are short interlaced (keyword ITK) articles interconnected by anchors within text flow and supportive glossary. (HTML5 and DW facilitate interlacing.)

The high level of coherence and clarity allows the readerly text to engage and hold the attention of the reader. The LM also cuts down the size of the web site, thus work for me. Relies on revision and extensive testing in different devices. Is ITK a support or top-level?

The detailed but distributed survey of LSi provides the engine of the site, emulating the prototype from SoS for EEE. Population needs page in LSi but may refer to larger site presentation.

Need site tools: TOC, interpretive essays, dashboard, home page (!)

Look and Feel ^

The LSi LM presents a consistent and distinctive look and feel intended to be user-friendly and readerly. The LM core provides an elegant streamlined reference to LSi coded in HTML5. Excess, including images, detract from LM ITK look and feel. The highly focused DOM provides a single article and a supporting aside that integrates the page around coherence, clarity, concision, convergence of media, and credibility. The high ratio of code to text offers a hallmark of the LM.

The LSi web remains a work in progress, so please regard what you see as, in effect, working notes, much like extemporaneous lecture notes that provide background and support to the reader. Indeed, Tim Berners Lee, the visionary who invented the WWW, intended the web to provide shared working notes. So, shoot me an email message with your comments and suggestions.

Document Object Model

Invisible to the reader, but not to the browser or to search engine spiders indexing the page (such as Google and Bing), the model that renders the page needs a consistent structure to reinforce the LM and ITK. This is the Document Object Model (DOM). These components define the DOM of the LSi Project:

Each page within the Laudato Si' Project will provide an aside that discusses the page, its construction, references and notes, and next steps for the development of the ITK within the page.

The World Sustainability Web Site | Laudato Si' Project
© Wayne Hayes, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Sustainability, Ramapo College | ™ ProfWork wkhayes@gmail.com
Initialized: 5/20/2017 | Last Update: 05/20/2017 | V. 0.2, Build #3
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