Progress on techniques stuff

On Friday I added some info to http://www.w3.org/International/geo/html-tech/tech-character.html#IDANKKO about representing characters using escapes.  This is still a work in progress.

Splitting the basic techniques document into parts meant that we were no longer able to simply run some xslt on one file to create the overview.  This created what I initially thought was a dilemma, then an opportunity wrt the Outline doc.  Over the weekend I started from scratch on this doc again, with I think a better result.  You can see the result so far at http://www.w3.org/International/geo/html-tech/outline/html-authoring-outline.html .  

Rather than generate the doc from the existing structure, I have created it from a separate view template. This takes us back in the direction of the 'repository' plus 'view' approach we had before, but with a significant difference.  The 'repositories' are now the documents heading for Note status.  The 'view' is the outline document.

The fact that the view is derived from a handcrafted template enables us to address navigation around all the techniques independently from the organisation they get in the Notes - which I think will prove to be extremely useful.  We can provide headings for the Notes that provide a cogent grouping of information for those who want to read all the detail in one go.  The outline doc (or should we call it 'overview' or 'index' now?) can be fine-tuned for guiding people to the right information along task oriented lines, and doesn't really need to have the same organisation as the Notes at all.  (As it happens, they are currently still very close, though we ought to do some usability testing around that.)

The importance of the outline doc is also greater now that we have split information into separate notes.  It really is the starting point now for the HTML/XHTML Authoring Techniques - which I think is good.

Note one useful innovation: You can link from the outline to the detail by clicking on a specific technique text, rather than at the section level. Given the current organisation, however, you can't link back to the outline doc from the Note.  I think this is fine. (Note also that I still have to write the xslt for the resources-only view we used to have.)

One question in my mind is how to deal with the table of contents for the outline doc.  We previously had an expanding table of contents at the top.  We could do the same, or we could create a higher level page that was only a toc (though we can keep something in the current outline doc like we have currently).  The benefit of this approach would be to reduce complexity on the page and clearly simulate the 'drill down' approach we are employing for task oriented location of info. In that context, the additional clicks are not such an issue - in fact, it would be more additional pages than additional clicks, anyway.  Thoughts?

Note also that I have added some additional columns to the right - though the data is just replicated twice. (We need to start making it correct.)

Still some way to go, but I like what I'm seeing here.  I also like the smaller techniques notes files - they feel much more manageable.

RI


============
Richard Ishida
W3C

contact info: http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ 

http://www.w3.org/International/ 
http://www.w3.org/International/geo/

Received on Monday, 15 March 2004 11:02:09 UTC