Re: Rich Web Client Activity and other Activity Statements

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

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2012 21:17:32 UTC