Minutes 2005-08-10: GEO telecon

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Minutes 2005-08-10: GEO telecon, at at 17:00 UTC/GMT, 10:00 Seattle, 13:00 Boston, 18:00 London, 19:00 Paris, 03:00 Melbourne


ATTENDEES

Deborah Cawkwell (BBC)
Andrew Cunningham (State Library of Victoria)
Molly Holzschag (No affiliation)
Richard Ishida (W3C, Chair)


APOLOGIES

David R Clarke (University of Sheffield) - hoped to join late
Russ Rolfe (Microsoft)


ADDITIONAL ITEMS

None


ACTIONS

This meeting / brainstorming:
ACTION AC to create list for GEO 'Quick Tips' (QT) card 
ACTION AC mono- vs multi-lingual sites: email observations
ACTION MH expand/elucidate tags example: Flickr vs Google by email
ACTION ALL work on audience, task, tag set (to be clearly explained by RI in separate email)

Previous meeting / document work
ACTION RI - set up rights for GEO members on WIKI
ACTION DC to check tests (FAQ: Styling using the lang attribute) on base browsers as identified in previous documents
ACTION RI publish FAQ (FAQ: Styling using the lang attribute) as replacement for current version.
DC xml:lang FAQ comments (xml:lang in XML document schemas) to chair
ACTION RI/AP liaison, then send for wide review (xml:lang in XML document schemas) 
ACTION RI: check with Addison whether zh-HK is best tag for Cantonese given multiple dialecst in HongKong (xml:lang in XML document schemas) 
ACTION RR: (FAQ: changing page encoding) email re Notepad (?)
ACTION RI: (FAQ: changing page encoding) send out for wide review
ACTION RI: (FAQ: Using character entities and NCRs) to add in brief terms what might go wrong re conversion with XML tools
ACTION RI break up 'When to use escapes' section - bit off-putting (FAQ: Using character entities and NCRs) 
ACTION RI: Add example to illustrate "You do not need to use leading zeros in escapes" (FAQ: Using character entities and NCRs) 
ACTION RI: formatting/indentation (FAQ: Using character entities and NCRs) 
ACTION RI: send for wide review (What should I consider wrt moving to UTF-8?)


INFO SHARE

RI: Lots of translations of GEO resources being added & stuff happening.
Using i18n home page (http://www.w3.org/International) to promote all this - great that there's so much activity.


MEETINGS

Today's meeting: outreach/audience brainstorming: how to effectively present the right information that fulfils the user task.
Agreed: useful & invigorating to brainstorm as well as review documents in meeting time.


REVIEW OF GEO WORK ITEMS

Documents in progress - not much movement.
See GEO plan/work items pipeline
http://www.w3.org/International/2003/plan.html


DISCUSSIONS

MH/RI: offline discussion re MH role in GEO group & outreach/audience. (Outreach is a GEO remit as well as online Guidelines)

MH role
- How best to work with GEO
- MH much skill/experience with outreach/audiences
- DC experience of this at web conference, Washington 2001, where MH engaged with audience knowledge of current HTML standard: 2-way interaction; clear, strong, evangelizing message about what was the current HTML standard, ie XHTML 1.0 (of which most delegates were unaware)
- MH standards engagement - active WASP member - use & sharing of W3C standards
- MH strong on editorial presentation/cut; author of several successful/popular book resources on web technologies 
- MH technical skills: html, css, accessibility
- MH - overwhelmed by content on GEO site - how to get across it all - concerned re lack of i18n knowledge
- MH - outreach (2-way dialog) & editorial presentation is where MH can do most work whilst getting up-to-speed on i18n
- MH - 2-way dialog helps to shape audience who-is
- MH - open to input from rest of GEO group

Outreach material format
- Not just web material
- Crib sheets, cf, WAI/WCAG 'Quick Tips' card with top tips/pointers
- Different formats could be useful, eg, PDF

I18N Quiz on GEO site
- cf w3schools (HTML: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_quiz.asp; CSS: http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_quiz.asp & w3schools continually adding to site, so undoubtedly will be more in more advanced areas of web technology) 

Getting Started
- Seems generally agreed that this is useful
- But, what is the best approach?
- Daunting in terms of bringing to fruition, possibly because it aims to describe the (whole) world of i18n. Too monolithic?

Alternative approach to Getting Started material
- cf, last week's meeting: talking about new FAQ (Changing page encoding - http://esw.w3.org/topic/geoChangingEncoding) 
- Series of steps, & different in terms of pointing to other/existing GEO resources, rather than blocks of textual explanation *within* that FAQ
- Could Getting Started material follow this model?

GEO top tips card
- Modelled on / inspired by WAI/WCAG card
- Agreed good/interesting idea
- Priority?
- Would have to be collaborative across GEO
- ACTION AC to create list for card (has to produce this sort of checklist for some of local government web masters)
- Checklist
- Principles, things you have to consider, eg
--- choose your encoding & declaration properly
--- dec lang & where it changes
--- then that's it for those topics
--- nice & succinct
--- & where to go for more information

GEO end users/audience
- Current material a bit diffuse
- How to get head round all the FAQs
- Possible approach: step-by-step?
- Possible approach: pointers?
- Agreed for 'general' audience
- What does that mean?
- 'General' = beginner?
- 'Beginner' = web technologies beginner or i18n beginner?
- Must be aimed at broadest possible audience
- MH in presentation work has noticed big increase in i18n: 50-60% (inc interest)

User/audience pathways 
- Rather than *define* the user, engage with user pathways/tasks
- For Getting Started material, if you are a developer, here is a pathway
- Different pathway for manager, designer, etc...
- Different pathways into the same information for different audiences, different ways of doing
- Agreed that a pathways/task approach is useful, given the differing levels of web tech knowledge of different users requiring i18n information
- RI proposes that we focus on what's available at any given time on the site, rather than try to describe i18n issues with too broad a brush

How to categorize GEO material for audience
- Try to define role of person addressed
- OR try to define through tasks
- Tagging, ie, keywords, eg 'CSS, HTML' or 'schema', 
- For a possible location see http://www.w3.org/International/questions/temp

Changing / increased sophistication of web developer role
- cf, FAQ  xml:lang in XML document schemas (http://esw.w3.org/topic/geoFAQxmllang)
- Seen as different sort of FAQ, addressing different sort of developer from usual (last week's meeting)
- BUT just as web development material increasing in complexity, so are skills of web developer
- Comparison: 5 years ago: web developers generally front-end focussed, now (also) increase in back-end skill requirement for web developers - general increase in technical sophistication (eg, RDBMS, rather than .dbm files) & focus on standards (organisation/industry/W3C) 

Reaching out to English as a(nother) language
- Language mark-up / use of Unicode should be as relevant / apply to English mono-lingual sites as well as to 'other' language sites
- How to Outreach to developers who don't (need to) think about language (as a problem)?
- Mono-lingual vs multi-lingual sites
- ACTION AC mono- vs multi-lingual sites: email observations
- eg, alt tag remains in English (language of developer?) but link/button text in other language
- English-centric issue
- Parallel with WAI - non-disabled-centric
- Sites should be available *with all information* no matter what profile of end user / audience: any place, any language, every body
- Every body, should be able to get every thing
- cf, RNIB (Julie Howell) (rough representation of what she said at BBC Usability Conference): no ghettos for blind people, they want junk mail too, they want everything everybody else gets (http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/publicwebsite/public_pr010705.hcsp) 

How does audience feed into Getting Started?
- Had discussed basic distinction, ie, developer, manager, designer
- Is this the right approach?
- Maybe other categories of people?
- Maybe easier to say "this article should be read by someone who is ....", eg:
--- surfing web 
--- writing XSLT
- Task-related

Audience: digging down: finding what they're looking for (task related)
- Many layers of dealing with W3C material
- Many developers do not engage with W3C in any way at all
- Specs are difficult & would seem irrelevant to many developers
- A particular strand of developers engage with W3C output

Information/resource rating
- MH: at Web Review, articles rated
- general level: 1
- advanced: 3
- people could use this to search
- RI tried this sort of labelling on GEO articles - difficult
- What does technical level refer to?
- 'advanced' in what? HTML, XML, RSS, semantic web?
- probably need to express beginner/advanced as related to i18n
- information/resources that address the task vs fills a knowledge hole (where user thought they knew *all* that)
- however, eg. What are NCRs and entities? (http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-escapes.html) is useful for both beginners and advanced practitioners

Pointers to i18n information
- Agreed good idea
- Point to appropriate material where possible, don't re-invent the wheel
- However, awareness that GEO material doesn't currently consistently address all i18n issues, eg, (permutations of) language attribute information is strong, not so strong is navigation between different language-based instances of web resources

>From RI, some possible task-oriented categories:
- site architecture
- writing CSS
- designing page layout
- troubleshooting problems
- content authoring using wysiwyg tools
- developing authoring tools
- creating schemas
- web surfing
- programming Web applications/databases
- managing Web projects
- designing information architecture / usability
- creating or tweaking html/xhtml code (ie. content authoring) - for articles dealing with charset or lang declaration this rolls together people who are using tools or not, and people who are developing scripts to generate code)
- authoring content (this is a tricky one, since for our current set of articles it really relates to creating or tweaking the html/xhtml code - even people who use wysiwyg tools

Tagging
- Use of '(meta) keywords' made explicit in the web presentation
- cf Microformats
- Tagging explicitly on page: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/temp (see top)
- Forward-compatibility
- Extensibility
- Tags would assist in pathways
- Come up with microformat set of tags
- Each article that exists would be tagged, also tag anything that's new

User interest/knowledge tags intersection with user tasks
- Tasks meet the tags
- Task is a bundle of search queries
- Useful pathway
- cf social software
- ACTION MH expand/elucidate tags example: Flickr vs Google by email

User levels
- Different entry points
- Hotel analogy
--- Reception for beginners - Getting Started
--- Signage to useful locations for others, tags can be used as browsing all the content on site: that's a mechanism that would be appropriate for intermediate/advanced
- Getting Started
--- Who are you?
--- if you are x
--- you need to worry about y set

- 2nd approach
- More detailed
--- Are you dev-ing schemas
--- Are you writing schemas
--- Are you writing xslt
--- What kind of things are you trying to work on?
- Those divisions might tie into tags on specific articles
- Tags equivalent to section headings in Getting Started materials

- Agreed a mixture of both could be useful


MOVING FORWARD FROM THIS BRAINSTORM
ACTION ALL
1) Look at task list
2) Match articles to task list - refine task list, especially last 2, which were more problematic
3) tag set - independently come up with tag list

DC to produce minutes ASAP as reference point for this work
RI to circulate minutes & to separately circulate task 

ACTION DC send out minutes asap
RI to circulate minutes
RI to circulate Outreach task referencing information in minutes


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Received on Thursday, 11 August 2005 09:52:12 UTC