Re: How to write code for W3C

On 8 Nov 2005, at 23:03, Karl Dubost wrote:
> Thank you very much for the generous offer but it's too premature.  
> I'm trying to identify the requirements, to see if it's possible to  
> do it for now.
>
> But on the actual design at least you could tell us what you think  
> is wrong for now  (I know many things) and what's missing or  
> suggestions for improving. So that we could collect kind of  
> requirements for it.

Some random notes:

- the bullets in the navigation list on the right look like clickable  
buttons: in OS X and in other user interface contexts, triangles like  
these mean "reveal the sub-items", and here they are misleading, I think

- the main title "W3C, Quality Assurance" is repeated twice at the  
very top of the page (in the two buttons and in the main heading) and  
is also in the <title> of the page, that looks a bit excessive to me

- the layout grid is too complex, IMHO. It's noisy because there are  
too many construction lines; I've highlighted them here:

  http://cavedoni.com/2005/11/w3c-qa-home

- the items in the top navigation bar (Activities | Technical Reports  
| etc.) are of secondary relevance to someone entering the QA home  
page, I think, but they are placed in a very prominent position.  
Other W3C subsites like the following three, do not have them, and I  
think it's for the good:

  http://www.w3.org/WAI/
  http://www.w3.org/XML/
  http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/

Are they mandated by some kind of internal style guide? Is there such  
a thing at all?

- the color combination blue on soft brown in the right-hand  
navigation bar looks a bit dated to my eye, but this is again a  
rather subjective point of view

- the right-hand side navigation bar, with its "stickyness", fills up  
too much screen real estate: if one scrolls down, there's too much  
unused whitespace above it, and in general, there's too much unused  
space below it, which only becomes more useless as the user's monitor  
size increases.

  http://cavedoni.com/2005/11/w3c-qa-nav

- I'm not convinced by the current hierarchy of the content on that  
page: the most fresh items (news items) are at the bottom of the  
page. At the top, there are an introduction to the QA activity and  
the "get involved" bit and the page basically evolves only vertically.

	* * *

This is just stuff off the top of my head: maybe I'm missing some  
good reasons for current design decisions, if so feel free to ignore  
my ramblings.

Cheers!
-- 
Antonio

Received on Tuesday, 8 November 2005 22:47:04 UTC