Spud - a broader definition of "survey data"?

[Olly Betts]

Hi folks,

Some of you probably know about website which details CUCC explorations in
Austria.  If not, you might want to take a quick look to put this mail in
context:

http://cucc.survex.com/expo/

At present this site is all hand-crafted HTML, which means that updates to
the survey data need to be processed and then data (e.g. entrance locations,
etc) has to be copied across manually.  Summary tables are collated and
updated by hand, and can get out of step.

The presentation and the data are entwined, so it's hard to produce a
version that is as usable and nicely set out as possible in a modern browser
without compromising usability in older browsers.

Inside CUCC there's been some discussion about putting the data in a
database and using templates for display.  Note that this "database" might
just be a set of XML files or similar - you could view the current web pages
as a database in HTML.

Now CUCC's Austria expedition isn't the only survey project with a website -
here are a couple of others I know about:

http://www.redrosecpc.demon.co.uk/easegill/
http://www.cavepage.magna.com.au/cave/Picos.html

(And I'd be interested to hear about others people know of).

I've started to wonder if spud ought to provide some mechanism to aid
production of such sites.  And if the presentation and data are kept
separate, it should also be possible to produce printed reports, etc by the
same mechanism.  I mean reports tailored for printing, rather than a just a
printout of a webpage.

It's not clear to me what form this mechanism might take, but as a simple
example perhaps you can attach arbitrary data (e.g. marked-up text, images,
video clips, flags to signal "full explored", "still going", etc) to
stations, surveys, caves, etc, and then spud would collate all these and
make them available to filters which produced the actual web pages (perhaps
either on demand, or in one pass).

I'm wondering if other people have thought about these issues, and perhaps
even written software already.

Cheers,
Olly