How to create QC web pages

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external: QC

Editing policy: this page should be edited by the webmaster only.

This is the internal QC home page. An external page is also available.

How to maintain external QC web pages

Purpose

The purpose of the QC web pages is to provide up-to-date information about

the QC process,
the pipelines,
the data structure, handling and processing.

Main potential readers ('customers') of these web pages are

Paranal SciOps
your QC colleagues
you yourself (memory!)
the scientific community.

These pages are also the central memory of all aspects about instrument data quality. Over the years this repository is meant to grow continuously and become the prime reference source about instrument QC and data.

The maintenance of the instrument-specific QC web pages belongs to the core functions of the QC scientist.

The pages require permanent attention and some care regarding styling and information management.

General rules and recommendations

The ESO web pages have information about the ESO web policy. Read them carefully.

All html files must have extension .html.
Absolute links to eso-internal URLs (starting with www.eso.org) must be avoided (the pages are replicated to the Paranal web server which has a different http address). Always use relative links (like /qc/index_amber.html, or process_cascade.html). Rather than linking to http:/www.eso.org/images/eso-logo.gif, link to /images/eso-logo.gif.

The ESO webmaster recommends to use the content management system CQ5. However, some of the QC web pages have been developed long before this system became available, and there was no support available for the migration. Hence these pages are still edited and maintained with 'old' templates.

For that case, the ESO webmaster recommends to use the interactive, graphical tool dreamweaver run on a PC.

It is preferrable to look into the existing QC web pages and select them as template.

Specific rules

Logical structure. The QC homepage is http://www.eso.org/qc/index.html. It has branches to index_vimos.html, index_isaac.html, index_uves.html etc. All QC pages need to fit into this scheme.

Below this level, there is one folder per instrument (called VIMOS, ISAAC, UVES etc.). The next level always has folders pipeline, DataManagement, and qc. Older instruments have ServiceMode which is not used anymore but kept for memory. These folders host the HTML files. There may also be folders like tools, txt and img.

pipeline has in-depth information about data types, data structure, calibration and reduction strategies and recipes etc. The pipeline information should be very much user-oriented, i.e. non-technical, high level. It should primarily answer questions like "why are things done that way".
qc is the core of our pages. This folder should host:

a documentation of what is QC checked and trended,
an explanation how this is done.

It is extremely important to present this information in a user-friendly way, even if this means hiding information. A good QC documentation can become a prime reference e.g. for PSO, for users preparing their applications or working with their data. And it may become the prime reference for yourself (or for your QC colleagues) since it's virtually impossible to keep all QC aspects in mind over the years.

It is a good idea to keep new QC pages as close as possible to this structure since otherwise users browsing between different instruments may easily become lost.

Alias. The alias /qc (or /QC) is equivalent to the lengthy/observing/dfo/quality.

Top level index page. The top level page http://www.eso.org/qc/index.html must not be modified without permission of the page owner.

TOC. No need for a TOC any longer (2017).

Implementation. The development of the web pages is done on your PC. Find more here.

Permissions. Permissions for the existing pages are set to read/write access for the whole w3dfo group which actually is the QC group. So be careful about modifications of pages not authored by you! Those pages with virtual includes need execution permission.