Re: Following web design lists

* Richard Ishida wrote:
>I believe that in every one of a number of interventions I have
>so far made to answer questions on that list, I've been able to
>point to material on the i18n website. It has, all the same,
>thrown up ideas for additional material we could write.

I participate in quite a number of relevant mailing lists, online fora
and newsgroups, and I've tried a few times to point to GEO material but
I found it takes too much effort to find a relevant (section of a)
document or what I found did not really meet the perceived requirements
of the audience.

I can't really memorize whether a document is labeled as an article, a
FAQ, a tutorial, or what else which means I can't remember the URI for
the document which means I have to look it up again and again and in
doing that have to browse all the categories again and again, all of
which is highly inefficient.

There is a document called "topic index" (to which the URI is resource-
index, not topic-index...) which might have helped, but the document is
difficult to find and not very well designed, among other things due to
poor link text (link text should make sense when read out of context,
"FAQ" is thus a bad one when it is not actually used where you do not
have space for much more).

I've already complained about URIs such as

  http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-char/#ri20030112.213746362

Pointing someone at just http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-char/ would
be ineffecient (the reader would first have to search for the relevant
section and he is unlikely to do that) and unkind and in order to point
them to the #ri20030112.213746362 section I would have to load the
document first into my browser which is something I might do once or
twice but then it annoys me too much.

It is also often the case that there is not really a point in pointing
someone at GEO resources, for example,

  http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-forms-utf-8

I could write "use UTF-8, it supports all characters" just myself. Same
for

  http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-why

I could just write "this can be useful sometimes" but that's not going
to convince anyone to actually do it, they usually ask for applications
that actually do use it and then they typically do not receive a good
answer (probably due to the lack of such applications). Another example
is

  http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/tutorial-char-enc/

It fails to to give a good explanation of what a character encoding
actually is which basically means I do not want to point people to it
who do not have quite a good idea about that; those who do however, do
not really need to be pointed to that article. One last problem is that
many things are mislabeled among the GEO resources, for example, I've
never seen someone asking "As part of a form, I have a list of terms in
a drop-down box. Why are they not correctly sorted when I translate the
items in the list?" yet that is a FAQ which then pretty much only says
"they are not sorted automatically in HTML".

In general, I refer people to such resources if that allows to provide
a much better answer with less effort than when I write a dedicated
answer myself and among those that enable doing that I chose the best
resource I can think of. This often means I write the answer myself...
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
68309 Mannheim · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

Received on Saturday, 27 November 2004 16:18:17 UTC