RE: [ESW Wiki] Update of "geoQuickTips" by RichardIshida

Hi Tex, Thanks for the comments.  See inline...


============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C

http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-i18n-geo-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:public-i18n-geo-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Tex Texin
> Sent: 25 November 2005 04:27
> To: GEO
> Subject: Re: [ESW Wiki] Update of "geoQuickTips" by RichardIshida
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> These quick tips need links to justifications and 
> explanations. As written some of them seem inappropriate.

Andrew is looking at links for the Web page version, and I plan to add new
interlinear explanations to the Web page version too.  So this is in hand.

> 
> a) "Escapes: Only use escapes for characters in exceptional 
> circumstances; use numeric character references rather than 
> character entities if possible"
> 
> There are many good reasons for using escapes, such as 
> clarifying visual ambiguity. I wouldn't think these reasons 
> are "exceptional circumstances".

Compared to the way authors typically use escapes (see eg. interventions on
the WSG list) I see those as exceptional circumstances.  Alternative
wordings welcome.

> 
> Why are numeric references prefered? They are less 
> recgonizable and therefore less friendly. When I am reading 
> someone else's source, I would much rather see entities than 
> references. And some authors and tools generate decimal NCRs, 
> which are of course useless to those of us entrenched in unicode.

I agree that this is probably too detailed for the quick tips.  For more
info, see the last para in the section
http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-escapes#not

> 
> b) Navigation: On each page include clearly visible 
> navigation to any localized pages or sites...
> 
> Although I agree with having navigation on pages within a 
> website, as a quicktip this seems to be more emphatic that it 
> should be. There are many places where this would be 
> inappropriate. I assume you are referring to links to an 
> equivalent localized page of the current page. If you just 
> mean navigating to the home page in another language, that is 
> less problematic, but perhaps also not needed on every page.
> 
> c) On encodings you seem to be suggesting declaring the 
> encoding in both the page and the http protocol. Is that the case?

Yes. This is consistent with advice in our tutorials and techniques
documents, though it is not possible to express anything with much subtlety
in the Quick Tips format.  Note that Quick Tips are far from a perfect
medium for conveying information, but they have great value in sensitizing
people to issues and prompting them to find out more.  

(Note also that many of your comments seem to relate to the longer version,
which may nopw be radically changed, given the new shorter versions we have
produced.)


> 
> d) For #10 validate. It should link to the validation pages. 
> The recommendation to refer to the other site materials 
> should be separate.

#10 will of course link to validation pages and other locations from the Web
site version.  Unfortunately splitting them will put an extra strain on
space for the cards. Note that this is exactly based on the final WAI quick
tip, which has been through much discussion too.  Unfortunately we have to
work within almost impossible constraints here.


Thanks for taking the time to send these comments.

Cheers,
RI

> 
> More when I have more time.
> tex
>

Received on Friday, 25 November 2005 09:58:10 UTC