[Lias] AUC and intranets

[Ken Yap]

>I don't know much about AUC, but looking at the sourceforge site and
>list, it doesn't look like much is going on there. The PHP rewrite
>didn't seem to get very far.

I'm going to have little time to devote to the rewrite as I'm working
full-time now. Converting from the HTML layout to PHP is very tedious
and very discouraging for someone who prefers to program and hates
twiddling HTML to get the appearance right. AUC makes extensive use of
tables to line things up but the C code for generating HTML is a
nightmare so I worked from the screen appearance.

A lot of the HTML conversion could be done by volunteers, leaving out
the embedded PHP logic for a programmer like me to deal with. Get a
group of volunteers and each take one screen to convert, putting in
static data where the query results are to go, that would help and
encourage me to tackle the embedded query logic and personalisation
(e.g. colours, user specfic strings). I don't even know how many
distinct screens there are; I haven't looked at all the program paths;
it would be probably faster to run through the program and enumerate
them. If it gets past this barrier, PHP5 with XSL support and WebDAV for
URI access would probably be the way to go.