Survey on spec style sheet redesign

Hi Second screen participants,

Starting this year, specification style sheets will be updated for new publications once per year. Alika (a.k.a. fantasai) is in charge for 2015. She is collecting input from working groups and thus asking us for possible comments we may have. Do not expect major updates to the style sheets this year.

As far as I can tell, we are using the default style sheet coupled with a few additional styles taken from the HTML5 specification. We haven't paid much attention to styles or tried to create custom styles so far, in particular.

Main questions for the group are listed below. I propose answers based on my own experience. Feel free to disagree or suggest additional comments! Keep in mind the questions are on styles, not on issues with ReSpec. Please send comments before end of next week (28 August 2015) so that I can fill out the survey in time on behalf of the group.


1.  What do you like about your current styles?
- The overall simplicity


2. What do you dislike about your current styles?
- Lack of clean separation between sections
- On narrow screens, examples and interfaces styles overflow their container. Not sure there is much that can be done there since these rows do not wrap
- On narrow screens, the left banner takes a lot of space on the left. This is particularly annoying when reading a spec on a mobile in portrait mode.
- In data tables, headers/borders are too strong/thick for our usage (mapping between event handlers and event handler event type)
- Extensive use of terms and references creates lots of underlines in some sections, particularly in algorithms.
- ReSpec includes a mechanism to display the list of terms defined in the spec in a pop-up window. Could a similar mechanism be useful in the /TR spec?
- Could there be a way to improve the layout of the terminology section that references terms defined in other specs so that it feels more "human friendly"?
- Algorithms are tough to read although that's arguably not a problem with styles.
- Probably more platform-specific, but the result looks weird on Internet Explorer for Mobile: text either appears as tiny (regular prose, examples) or normal (ToC, algorithms, notes)


3. The CSSWG has made a number of minor improvements to the existing spec styles, which might just be adopted wholesale. Comments? See example spec at: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-text-3/
- Good separation between sections
- Underlines seem to have been softened a bit, improving readability in sections that use links a lot.
- It's very good to be able to quickly navigate to the fragment corresponding to the underlying section or definition.
- Result looks good on Internet Explorer for Mobile with a couple of exceptions: numbers in the ToC and left columns in data tables are tiny for some reason.

Any other views, one way or the other?

Francois.

PS: you may also send individual feedback on the spec-prod@w3.org mailing-list. Please be sure to use "[restyle]" in the subject line if you do so.

Received on Tuesday, 18 August 2015 08:36:09 UTC