Hi, Ben-
We have a plan to improve our documentation for Web developers and
designers. The W3C site is really intended for people working on the
specifications or implementations themselves, not people looking to
learn about how to use the technologies.
If you have specific suggestions about how we could address your needs
as someone learning Web development for the first time, I would be
interested in your feedback, and would certainly consider your feedback
in our ongoing documentation efforts.
As far as the site being disorganized, while I agree with you, it was
built up over 15+ years by hundreds of different people in an
uncoordinated way, so I expect that redesigning the whole site would be
more work than it is worth; the older pages are largely kept there for
historical purposes.
Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Developer Relations
Project Coordinator, SVG, WebApps, Touch Events, and Audio WGs
On 5/17/12 4:12 PM, Ben wrote:
Hi - I'm a newbie web-developer in (self) training and I've been trying
to navigate your website. Noticed today that you have this
http://www.w3.org/2006/rwc/Activity however the only place I could find
that linked was http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/ - I event went to
your site map http://www.w3.org/Consortium/siteindex to see if it had a
link this the activity statements which I saw on the left-hand
navigation bar, and I don't see anything in the sitemap. Nor does there
seem to be any link from the main site or the sitemap to the
http://www.w3.org/Interaction/ which is also listed in that
XMLHttpRequest section.
I've always loved sitemaps in their ability to let me see an overall
structure and tease out important parts of the website which are
obscured by the endless array of links, so I'm really dismayed that W3C
hasn't seemed to put a lot of care and love into its sitemap.
Also, what's up with the Rich Web Client Activity URL having a 2006 in
it? The page says this group was founded in 2010. Given that it has the
2006 and it has the old look, it raises questions as to whether
attention is really being paid to it
On another note, you've got I guess hundreds of standards, and in many
cases these standards are the /de facto/ documentation - and yet you
really don't do a lot to give any sort of high-level introduction or
something tying together the different parts, from what I've seen.
High-level overviews are kind of like "encapsulation" and I think it's
really important to have a few pages discussing how everything fits
together and what's important and what's not. For example, I read
through the DOM Core and noticed there was a fair bit of discussion on
"entity". According to Sitepoint, even though this dates back to DOM
Level 1 there's no implementation
http://reference.sitepoint.com/javascript/Entity. I have no idea what
the purpose and function of the entity is, since the spec didn't seem to
explain how this would help.
I am aware of webed, which I have some issues with in terms of not
really connecting the dots either, but maybe I'll try to get involved in
that after I've waded through more of the scattered documentation,
existing largely in tutorials, blog posts, and the rarely-edited MDN wiki.
Regards,
Ben Creasy
