[Summary] What next?

Hi there.

This is the first [Summary] message. Fortunately it's not intended
to re-state the scope of this list, which has been well respected
so far, congratulations to all. Unless it proves itself useless, or
annoying, we'll try to issue such [Summary] messages every once in a
while, to summarize discussion (can be useful for new participants) and
the main points stated, focus on some topics, and eventually prepare
deliverables.

This is the first [Summary] message, so it will be special. Instead of
proposing you a summary and/or orientations (which I shall do later), 
I'll simply ask "what next?".

This should be a thrilling question, but it could be our nemesis :
excluding "intro" messages (very useful and interesting to find out what
are the context, goals and expectations for each of us), a few book
promotion, and a call for review of a document under work, we already
had a few rounds of discussions. Some of them hold their own value,
others will be wasted time (or mere re-doing the world again and again)
if they're not followed by action, or turned into "real" documents.

Here are, therefore, a few proposed deliverables for this group. These
deliverables can be done and hosted here (i.e W3C), or elsewhere
(newborn maccaws group[1] comes to mind, but there are many other site
gathering such documents), not a problem as long as (John Colby told
this very well) we parallelize but don't step on each others' toes.

****************

First, lists. I must say I don't fancy lists : they're hard to maintain
up-to-date, hard to make really objective - not just advertisement -,
etc. Plus, we're at W3C, with vendor neutrality as a core principle,
that could make it trickier...

Lists ideas which have been floating in the air:
- standard compliant "big" websites
- web standards books and reviews [2]
- "resources", standards evangelism websites

We could also, and that's an orientation I deem worthwile, turn our
discussion into "white-paper" style documents. reading through the
discussion threads, I see a few candidates already (I shall prepare
summaries of those threads later):

- WYSIWYG or multi-platform, why standards can help achieve both
- metrics and cost/benefits business cases
	- defining metrics (framework)
	- cost/benefits of using valid HTML
	- cost/benefit of using CSS for style
	- others?
- answering misconceptions about web standards
(Karl Dubost from W3C QA, in an article to be released, answers, with
a systematic yet not pedantic approach, a few misconceptions; this
could/should be extended)

Third idea is to contact and educate people. 
- contact and educate web agencies
 (We - W3C QA - are already working on a "what you should propose 
 to your clients" note)
- contact and educate companies
 (We - W3C QA - are already working on a "what you should ask your
 web design agency/web department)
- contact and educate teachers and the education world
- contact and educate governments

But for all of those, again, we need more than good will and enthusiasm
to convince, we need material, resources, proofs, figures. This may be
yet another good thing to work on here.

****************

I suggest we pick a few work orientations among those, and try to focus
on them and try to produce tangible bits out of our discussions.


[1] http://www.maccaws.org/
[2] http://www.maccaws.com/wiki/?page=BooksList

Yours, 

Olivier
-- 
Olivier Thereaux - W3C
http://www.w3.org/People/olivier | http://yoda.zoy.org

Received on Tuesday, 23 July 2002 04:45:30 UTC