Re: funding from Adobe to work on HTML 5 authoring materials

On Fri, 23 Jan 2009, Dan Connolly wrote:
> 
> Specifically, quoting from the contract:
> 
> "The consultant will be responsible for creating and filling the 
> editor’s position of an HTML 5 Authoring Specification under the aegis 
> of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The intent is to have Adobe 
> provide necessary funding to hire an independent neutral, widely 
> respected, and technically competent editor for this specification, to 
> offload the current editor, Ian Hickson, allowing him (Hickson) to 
> develop a browser implementation specification."

That's great news!

The two most important ways that a new editor could help reduce my 
workload are writing a spec describing the legacy APIs and markup features 
for authors transitioning from older features (and for UAs implementing 
those features), and a spec describing the "best practice" for rendering 
defaults for guiding authors in what to expect from visual UAs (and 
telling those UAs what the recommended implementations are).

Also useful would be editors for numbers 4 and 5 from this list, though 
there is less emphasis on the author for these:

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Oct/0127.html

(I have leads for 2, 3, and 8 already; I believe you've already said 
you're interested in 6; and editors for 7, 9, and 10 wouldn't be that 
helpful at this time.)


> I interpret the term "HTML 5 Authoring Specification" pretty broadly; 
> i.e. mostly tutorials and guides.

That would be really great too, we really need good tutorials. So far we 
have a few blog entries here and there, but it's all very scatter-shot and 
there's no single narrative to really help authors through the process. If 
the contract above is binding, though, it should be noted that this won't 
really do much to offload me in any way -- right now it would do more to 
offload Lachlan Hunt and Mike Smith.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'