Moving the indic layout requirements doc towards FPWD

Hello Prashant,

During the last i18n WG teleconference, which you attended by IRC, I was 
actioned to follow up with you the proposals arising from that 
discussion about how to move work on the Indic Layout Requirements doc 
towards W3C First Public Working Draft status.

You seemed to be in agreement with the proposals during the call, so I 
think that this email should just clarify what we are proposing and 
propose some next steps.

Here are the proposals from the WG meeting:

[1]
We recommend that you port the editor's draft of the document to the 
ReSpec template - this will provide you will a lot of authoring 
assistance (such as updating publication dates, numbering sections, 
supplying boilerplate text, etc.) and will significantly smooth the path 
to publishing later as a FPWD.

You can see an example of an editor's draft document published using 
respec at http://www.w3.org/International/docs/charmod-norm/. If you 
look at the source (ignoring all the CSS at the top), you will see that 
you need to enter some basic data in javascript variables in the head, 
and respec will reconstruct the boilerplate for the final document from 
that information. For a basic use, apart from that, you just add your 
content to the body, with a couple of extra blocks for abstract and 
status information. It's pretty simple. If you need help figuring this 
out, please ask me.

You can find a link to the respec guidelines at http://www.w3.org/respec/.

You are currently serving the editor's draft from the w3cindia.in 
server. You can continue to do so, or we can publish it from the W3C 
server, as you prefer. (The FPWD will, of course, be published from the 
W3C server.)


[2]
Please don't change the link to the editor's document when you update 
it.  This makes it very difficult to track down the right version of the 
document, and also means that people may read the wrong version without 
realising that it is out of date (as almost happened at the start of the 
WG mtg). It also makes it difficult to link to the document from email 
or other places. Please use a stable link.

Also, when sending a request for review or announcement of an update to 
the public-i18n-indic list please use a separate email with a clear 
subject heading, rather than sending it in reply to an existing thread. 
Currently, we have to look in the archive to find the latest version of 
the document, but it is not easy to identify which email contains the link.


[3]
In the short term we would like you to remove the screen snaps of 
browser results from the document (you could move them to a separate web 
location if you want). This is partly because they are 
technology-specific, but also because the will soon become out of date. 
Then we would like you to begin developing tests to replace them, using 
the format of Test The Web Forward program (see 
http://testthewebforward.org/), so that appropriate tests can be 
incorporated into CSS/HTML tests suites. Using that format also provides 
the opportunity to assemble the results using the i18n WG standard 
approach also (see http://www.w3.org/International/).  Browser 
developers tend to refer to our results pages.  The TTWF documentation 
also gives lots of useful advice about how to create good tests. (Please 
provide the requested metadata, and in particular an assertion for each 
test.)

Replacing the screen snaps with tests in this way allows us to keep 
things up to date, and integrate with other initiatives.

Note, btw, that I already created a few tests for first-letter styling 
support at 
http://www.w3.org/International/tests/repository/css3-selectors/first-letter/results-first-letter#devanagari


[4]
As we have discussed before, we would like to see the main layout 
requirements document become independent of references to technology (in 
the same way as the Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Latin layout 
requirements).  This will give the document a permanent relevance, 
reduce the need for maintenance, and also simplify the document for 
users and content authors.

To build a bridge with CSS or other technologies, a separate document 
should be created, and any technology-specific information in the 
current layout requirements moved to that. This latter document is the 
one that will (hopefully) get out of date quickly (as issues are 
addressed) and be more often updated to show the current status.

To achieve this we recommend that the first two paragraphs in the 
current abstract be merged, and text such as "layout to be realized with 
CSS technology. It shows some of the major issues in CSS 2.1 & 3.0 for 
Hindi language test layout." be removed. (Of course, we can still state 
the intention that CSS and Digital Publications will benefit from the 
document's requirements, it's just that this document won't point out 
where the gaps are.)

We should probably also consider moving the What is CSS section to the 
bridging document, rather than here.


[5]
Please incorporate into the new version of the document the recent 
information sent by Swaran Lata (and any others) to the mailing list.


[6]
Once the above changes have been made and a new revision of the doc is 
available, the i18n WG would like to review it and send more detailed 
comments and suggestions on the text, with the aim of helping you get it 
into a shape which we can publish as an official FPWD.  Once we think we 
are at that point, we will need to propose to the i18n WG that they 
publish the FPWD, and if we get the go-ahead, we'll need to produce a 
separate version of the document for publication.  Then we need to raise 
the necessary publication requests, etc. I can take care of that as team 
contact for the WG.


I hope that helps.  Please let us know if you have any questions or want 
to discuss anything.  I look forward to hearing from you soon and moving 
the document forward.

Best regards,
RI

Received on Friday, 18 July 2014 14:04:51 UTC