Re: "Video, Audio, and Media in HTML 5" (and outline/sketch of other author/developer ideas)

Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> Dan Connolly wrote:
>> We have Ian's spec and Lachlan's guide and Mike's markup spec,
>> but those all take an exhaustive-enumeration approach. I started
>> outlining a successive elaboration guide to HTML 5, but I'm not
>> sure "here's how you make a <p> TAG" is going to get much attention
>> at this point, so I'm inclined to focus on something closer to
>> the leading edge, i.e. video/audio/media.
>
> Do you intend to make this follow a cookbook approach, which primarily
> focuses on how to create specific kinds of content based on use cases?
> e.g. Like the following use cases:
>
> * How to publish a video or audio in a web page and create
>   custom user interface for it.
> * How to use canvas to draw a chart or create an interactive game.
> * How to mark up photos with captions.
> * etc.

This "cookbook" approach was discussed during the meeting at W3C TPAC in 
Boston 2007. I thought this is what Lachlan's work was going to be. I was 
dissapointed to see it take a different, less approachable form. Dan, I 
think we had a hallway chat about this at some point during the W3C TPAC 
2008 in France?

In my experience, authors think in terms of content-to-markup rather than 
markup-to-content. The cookbook approach is a perfect fit for this. 
Tutorials in that style are the ones I usually see authors sharing links to 
on forums and within their companies.

I'm happy to see Dan has started by reading existing popular guides and 
tutorials about using HTML. A rummage through my HTML collections might give 
further insights into the diversities and similarities of how authors 
currently approach HTML. :)

At the moment I'm still looking for funding to resume my participation in 
HTMLWG. But if I sort that out, I'd like to help with the authoring guides. 
As well as continuing to study HTML and suggest refinements to HTML5.

-- 
Ben Millard
<http://projectcerbera.com/web/study/>

Received on Friday, 23 January 2009 22:08:04 UTC