Hi Everyone,

We've made a fair bit of progress on the instrument web pages and now we'd like to open them up for comments again. The best place to start is at http://sciopsedit.gemini.edu/node/10002, which should be accessible to everyone. The Michelle, T-ReCS and Mid-IR Resources pages have had all of their content copied over, and NIRI and Altair are not far behind. The pages more or less follow the layout that was presented at the science staff meeting in May. A pdf copy of that presentation, explaining the reasoning behind the proposed structure, can be found at ftp://ftp.gemini.edu/pub/Web_work.pdf

We would very much like your comments on the pages so far, and your suggestions for changes and improvements. Instrument scientists (and your teams), our group has been experimenting with a lot of pages and we've come up with something that we think we like, but we would certainly like your feedback, and we'd also like to know how closely you want to be involved as we get closer to finalising things.

I've set up a page to gather people's comments so that everyone can see everyone else's ideas and suggestions (http:// sciopsedit.gemini.edu/sciops/comments-august-07; click on "add new comment"). This will require a username and password that Jason or I (or any of the working group, I think) can set up for you. If that's really too difficult, email us instead (webwg@gemini.edu) and I'll paste your comments there for you.

There are some areas that we're still working on, including menu formatting and usability (e.g., more indenting of various levels, making it easier to distinguish wrapped text from separate entries), the functionality of the instrument show/hide link and some text styling issues. We'll also be working on a table of contents and/or site map, human-readable URLs, different themes for the different instruments and - if there seems to be the demand - alternative style sheets so that (for instance) the menus can be disabled altogether.

Whatever comments we have from you by Monday August 27th will be taken into account as we start to finalise the instrument pages. We would like to release at least some of the instruments in this new format after the 08A proposal deadline, after a phase of more intensive testing of the "final product".

Hoping to hear from you soon,

Rachel