On 19 May 2010, at 7:14 AM, Anthony Kolber wrote:
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.
Hi Anthony and Ben,
Thanks for the work on the style sheets around the specifications. I
recently tried to redesign the specification styles (with some other
usability improvements) and the response was quite negative from the
editors themselves. Thus, before considering taking up a similar
project, I'd like to hear from the editors themselves.
Meanwhile, we are also considering some ideas for improving the
usability of the specifications more broadly, for example, by creating
versions that may be easily annotated (e.g., like the PHP
documentation). Perhaps one thing to do would be to leave the current
styles as is, and adopt new styles for the "live, annotated versions."
I'll keep watching this thread.
_ Ian
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
--
Ian Jacobs ([email protected]) http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel: +1 718 260 9447
