Subject: Links to the "tools" web pages

From: "Worley, Dale R (Dale)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:41:01 -0400

In regard to making it easier for the naive to find and use the various IETF tools:

I notice that there are *two* sets of IETF tools.  One is titled "IETF Web Tools" (http://www.ietf.org/tools/), and contains a link to "IETF Community Tools" (http://www.ietf.org/tools/tools.html) as well as section titled "IETF Critical Tools".  The second is titled "IETF Tools" (http://tools.ietf.org/).  Only "IETF Web Tools" is accessible from the www.ietf.org (left-side) navigation bar (along with its sub-page "IETF Community Tools") -- the "IETF Tools" are accessible from a link "Tools" in a row across the bottom of pages.

This situation is incredibly confusing for people who are not very experienced in the structure of the IETF web site:

1) There are four pages (or sections of pages) titled "IETF XYZ Tools" (for various values of XYZ).  The meanings of these distinctions are not obvious.

2) The page titled "IETF Tools" is not the super-page of the other four pages.

3) In the navigation structure, there are three links, "Web Tools", "Community Tools", and "Tools", which relate in no obvious way to the functions of the tools in question.

Fixing this correctly would require categorizing all of the tools based on what they do and how people use them and then partitioning their descriptions on pages based on that.  Which would require a lot of work.

But in the short run, it would help a lot to revise the left-side navigation bar to at least point to *all* of the tools:

    IETF Tools -> http://www.ietf.org/tools/
        Community Tools -> http://www.ietf.org/tools/tools.html
        Additional Tools -> http://tools.ietf.org/
        Wikis -> http://wiki.tools.ietf.org/group/

And add a section/link to http://www.ietf.org/tools/ to point to/describe the "Additional Tools":

    Additional Tools

    IETF-related tools, standalone or hosted on <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/">tools.ietf.org</a>.

And change the bottom-nav link "Tools" to point to http://www.ietf.org/tools (the same as the left-nav "IETF Tools").

As a user interface that would still be rather lame, but someone who was attempting to link-walk through all the pages hanging off the left-nav-bar link "IETF Tools" to find a particular tool would be able to succeed.

Dale