[seqfan] Re: OEIS Frontend Redesign

[Marc LeBrun]

The soul of the OEIS is the data, not the presentation.  It's a recurring mistake to conflate the online knowledge base with the website.

There's no reason there has to be just one presentation that can visit the data, as Alexander & Tom have nicely demonstrated.

To wit, the Universal Resource Locator https://oeis.org <https://oeis.org/> simply addresses the "classic" presentation of the data, while the Universal Resource Locator https://www.intdb.io <https://www.intdb.io/> addresses their new presentation of the data.

So, is there actually a problem that needs to be solved here?  I don't really see one.

What might be a nice easy community-building move would be to put a button or similar affordance on the oeis-dot-org front page that would link to the intb-dot-io front page (where there is already a link back to oeis-dot-org).  Maybe we could put it under the existing "login" affordance or something.

To future-proof in case users want to create yet more front ends -- and I think that would actually be great -- we'll can make it link instead to an OEIS page that's a "gallery" of alternative interfaces.

It's not like offering a choice presents such a burden that this requires an exclusive either-or decision.  If a user prefers one to the other, it's no big deal to type either  "OEIS" or "INTDB" as the spirit moves them.  And moreover they can bookmark their favorite, their browsers will offer it in their autocomplete and "recently visited" histories, etc etc.


(That said, just for the record, I also am among those that dislike the currently-fashionable UI styles, optimized for sausage-fingered fumbling on elephantine phones.  I want more meat and less whitespace -- in fact i wish the main OEIS banner was shorter so I could get to the main course with less scrolling!

I'm not personally very sympathetic about this issue, because I never try to do anything serious except on my desktop machine.  If you insist on using your mobile phone, or your Apple Watch, or your Virtual Reality goggles, or the driver's console of your car, you are naturally going to be limited in what you can do!

Heh, Neil, you remind me of this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0 )