Future of the repo / BJC Curriculum

[cycomachead]

This is probably all too much for a single issue, but after a decade plus, I think we need to re-think some things.

The original goals for "llab" were:

• no build system
• Just HTML for writing content
• The "topic" file system would allow you to re-use pages across labs/courses
  • This influenced things like a generic img/ directory and a a cur/ directory and so on...
• Topic files should be fairly simple, and easily human-writable.
  • That left out JSON and YAML and led us to a custom, unspecified format

Today we have different needs:

• The current system is slow to load
• We need to generate pages like vocabulary, quiz pages, course indexes, etc.
• We need to translate a course+images in multiple languages
• We want to be able to export PDFs of lab content
• We'd like to be able to export word versions of lab content
• The repo itself is a mess, and we could definitely use some cleanup.

To an extent, we can bolt-on tools to the existing structure, but it may be worth thinking about how we want to resolve the issues. Do we pull in additional tools that sit on top of our current HTML+JS setup?

We still have a desire to keep the required technical contributions pretty minimal...

[brianharvey]

I vote for a radical cleanup. Some of those things can be done by students.