On 23 Jun 2006, at 02:32, brian suda wrote:
Today on IRC[1], we talked briefly about the Microformats Logo and how
it is setup to be a Community Mark. Tantek pointed to Chris Messina's
original post about the idea of a community mark[2].
I really do like the idea, it fits nicely with everything that we are
doing here as a community, but i do have some reservations and
questions. Hopefully, as a community we can help clarify what a
"community mark" (cm) really is?
The recent brouhaha over the feed icon might be a good point of
reference.
In short, Mozilla claimed they had some kind of right over the new
'standard' feed icon - which they probably do - and have applied for
a trade mark. This annoyed pretty much everyone, whom I believe
really saw the icon as something more akin to what we call a CM.
The current state of play is Mozilla are trying to retrospectively Do
The Right Thing and have come up with a set of usage guidelines that
don't seem too restrictive (at a quick read):
http://www.hecker.org/mozilla/feed-icon-guidelines
Perhaps this sort of thing (guidelines, not trade marks) could work
well for community marks. However, perhaps the guidelines should be
open to annotation, and a formalised periodic review. So if lots of
people annotated the same point to say "x doesn't work for me, could
we change this to y?", then that change should be incorporated into a
revision.
Real world example: the feed icon guidelines set a minimum icon size
of 16 pixels square. I, and lots of others that I've seen, use the
icon at sizes like 12x12. That would be a perfect point to mark on
the guidelines requesting that a minimum size of 12x12 be considered,
as the icon still works well at that size and offers designers a
little more flexibility.
In the t-shirt example, where a stylised low-res monochrome version
of the logo was used, Brian would need to annotate the "don't mess
with the logo" point in the guidelines to say, hey, how about this
suggested variation?
drew.
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