Re: Applying design to W3C specs

> 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