Information Architecture

[DRAFT] Last updated by Joe Schaefer on Sun, 10 Mar 2024    source

 

Introduction

Information Architecture organizes and arranges the entire gamut of technologies relevant to the design, presentation, relationships, and architectural constraints that cover every URL you serve over HTTP, both publicly and privately. This essay is a high-level survey of my expertise in these areas; it is far from comprehensive given the vast field it intends to cover.

Usability, Discovery, and Link Topology: the Big Picture

Contrasting Heirarchies with Tagged Search

Radically Rearchitecting Wiki Search

Human Interface Goals

Powerful Syntax

Hashtagged Seaches are Keyword Specific Instead of Generic Word Searches

Easy Scope Expansion

Interactive Results Filtration Engine

See the section on HATEOAS for an overview.

Built-In Performance Scaling to 100K document trees

Comprehensible Result Ordering / Prioritization

Per-User Security (ACL) Contextualized Results

Hits Linked Directly to Target-Specific Document Locations

Live, RealTime Results (aka No Stale Indexed Corpus)

Customer Adoption Goals

Deliverable as “application/json” Upon Request

Options:

• pass “as_json=1” in the query string
• set “Accept: application/json” in the request headers

Styling is Semantically Controlled by Customer Installation of the /content/css/boostrap.min.css File

search.html Template is Overridable by Customer Installation of the /templates/search.html File

main.html Derived Template is Overridable by Customer Installation of the /templates/main.html File

REST, HATEOAS, and Content Negotiation

Beautiful URLs — Both Permanent and Transient

Structured, Future-Proofed MultiMedia Content

GitHub Flavored Markdown with $\KaTeX$ and Mermaid.js Integration

YAML Headers for MetaData

A Turing Complete Programming Language Ain’t Data - it doesn’t belong in your content sources

The Value of Enabling Template Preprocessing on Content

• Inline Data Processing Engines

  • embedded, “safe” json literals in built files
  • build-time markdown table generation

Slowly Evolving, Centralized Configuration of Wiki Facts

• corporate service urls
• software artifact locations and version numbers

The role of ssi Tags in Your MultiMedia Strategy

Access Controls on Content, from a Single Source of Truth Perspective

• walk_content_tree() in path.pm
  • acls
  • dependencies
• acl.yml

SunStar Systems’ Orion™ for ZFS-backed Platforms

1. zfs clones
2. zfs send/recv

StageMaster: Experimentation with Pure Client-Side State Engine

GitOps build workflows

1. Frontend
2. Backend
3. Documentation