Re: Moving the indic layout requirements doc towards FPWD

Hello Richards,

Thanks a lot for your efforts for taking steps towards our work on the Indic Layout Requirement document in the FPWD status. This is indeed a great step towards Indic layout requirement in W3C system. Swaran Lata , Myself and Prashant will all needful to do this following all of your suggestions mentioned in the appended mail. Once the draft document is ready , we shall send it to you for review and further steps towards official FPWD.

With best regards,
Somnath

On 07/18/14 07:33 PM, Richard Ishida  <ishida@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
-- 

Dr. Somnath Chandra
Scientist-E
Dept. of Electronics & Information Technology
Ministry of Communications & Information Technology
Govt. of India
Tel:+91-11-24364744,24301856
Fax: +91-11-24363099
e-mail :schandra@mit.gov.in