> Hi Ben, > > On May 17, 2010, at 13:57 , Ben Schwarz wrote: > > I recently gave a presentation here in Melbourne titled "Take back the web" > > (http://www.slideshare.net/benschwarz/take-back-the-web) > > It discusses (there are notes on the presentation) that the W3C needs the > > presence of professional designers and further real world use cases.. > > That's certainly very true. That being said, it's not something that W3C > (whether by that you mean the actual organisation or the community of people > who contribute to W3C-approved standards) can do much about on its own. I'd > actually like to reverse your claim: professional designers need to show up > and make themselves heard as part of the W3C community. Standards are made by > those who show up. > > > Taking on this challenge personally, I teamed up with my business partner > > to focus on applying some typography to the existing W3C specifications. > > We offered it as a userscript and wrote about it on my blog. > > > > http://www.germanforblack.com/articles/moving-towards-readable-w3c-specs > > > > I'd really like to see a W3C response from my recent commentary and would > > like to open up for some discussion in this area.. > > I'm not sure what you mean by "a W3C response". I don't speak for W3C but I'm > responding anyway because improving the production of W3C specifications has > been a topic of interest of mine for a while. I think we were most interested in hearing what people involved with the W3C's thoughts were on what we've done. So, I think this counts. > > But before we jump into a discussion of style, I think that we should take a > step back and first come up with a set of typographic conventions to be used > by all (new) specifications, which could then be styled. Doug took a stab at > listing some of these (the document is known to be missing conventions for > APIs, but that can be looked at later). I'd be interested in knowing what > your opinion is, and if you have any suggestion: > > http://www.w3.org/People/Schepers/spec-conventions.html > > Note that if a redesign happens, it probably won't apply retroactively to > documents already published in /TR/ as it would be likely to break them. When > the W3C website was redesigned last year, a redesign of the specification > style was also made (it eventually proved to have too many issues and was > pulled, though I believe interest remains). Retroactively applying it to > published documents was, erm, unpopular. I think a new stylesheet is all that is needed here. The majority of the specs are incredibly well-formatted html (even the much older ones) and the amount we could achieve with a minimal overwrite stylesheet was enormous. I think Doug's conventions would definitely be a step in the right direction, but a consistently and considered stylesheet could make a big difference even with the existing specs. > > Finally, I don't know if public-html is the right place for this discussion > (though I don't mind either way, I leave that up to the chairs). If it keeps > going, it might be better fit for spec-prod > (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/spec-prod/). It's fully public; it > hasn't seen much traffic but nothing says it can't have more going forward. I have CC'd it into spec-prod as well. > > Thanks for contributing! Thanks for the feedback! > > -- > Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/
— Anthony Kolber
