RE: SVG Book

Apologies for the delay in my response here -- too much going on these days.

The book (W3C's current version) is here: http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/resources/svgprimer.html

Something identical in content but differing in styling can be seen here:
http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/cs427/StateOfArt-Dailey.html

Note the differential handling of code and explanations in tables between the two treatments.*

I think it makes some sort of sense to invite a couple of co-editors, like Helder or Wade or Ruud or Jeff or Manuel or others who have expressed an interest in the thing. As primary author, thus far (though several have had their comments included), I would hope for editors who have some tolerance of my writing style and would not seek to purge all personality from the writing. It involved maybe a person year of work (over two years time -- don't hold me to the accuracy of my estimate) and, as other authors of technical works know, there is a lot of work behind the scenes in cobbling together a couple hundred pages of text, code and graphics. Having official editors (other than me) would ensure that some cohesion be retained.

I wish to extract myself from any bottleneck of revising it, and though wiki-fying it as Manuel suggests has its appeal, I think the terms of the license agreement http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2008/07-SVG-Book-acquisition-license.html may not allow that, and it would indeed risk loss of authorial intent (including sprinkles of humor, wild speculation, occasional flights of fancy and sheer hyperbole) that appealed to at least some of the reviewers of the original work. 

I think that over time, as other authors contribute chapters, update and correct content, and update and correct the markup and styling, the list of authors should be expanded to include the relative degree of their contributions, sorta like how the list of designers on Adobe Photoshop has mutated over the past 20 years, but with certain names remaining in the list.

I'd also hope that early in the document, we might place a link to its "original" version at http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/cs427/StateOfArt-Dailey.html so that if the W3C version should start to stray dramatically from authorial style, the interested student might be able to see where it began.

I completely agree with Doug's and other's suggestions that the book should be broken into chapters (each of which would load in a reasonable time). (Interestingly, I have no troubles loading versions in any of my browsers except for IE8, even when using new computers.) In truth, I have found everyone's comments constructive and agreeable.

I really appreciate everyone's interest in bringing the book forward and making it ready for announcement. I have linked to both the W3C and my version from my web page at http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/ indicating my own sense that the "content" is good enough for publication, though I understand and respect Doug's and others' concerns about publication guidelines, well-formedness etc. (I did rely on some HTML5 tricks to get the thing to style properly in my version, though meaning that that version may never validate until HTML5.555555... finally materializes, and that seems to require a year for every decimal of accuracy in the version number.)

Holler if this doesn't make sense.

David

* I rather prefer the latter, though it may violate all manner of styling rules -- I discovered that styling <code> was difficult to get working consistently across all browsers, and yes being visible in IE is important to me since I don't wish to throw away 2/3 of potential readers. However, since IE 8 at the office was installed both versions seem to make the browser crash. It works okay in IE7, however. This is interesting since there is no embedded SVG in the document currently.

-----Original Message-----
From: public-svg-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:public-svg-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Helder Magalhães
Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2009 6:48 AM
To: Jeff Schiller
Cc: Doug Schepers; SVG IG List
Subject: Re: SVG Book

Hi everyone,


> Actually went through earlier emails and failed to find anything that
> says the location of the CVS repo of the book.  Has this been done or
> still needs to be done?

I also don't recall anything stating where is the book located, if it
is already at W3C CVS servers. A quick crawl using the Web interface
[1] didn't reveal anything related.


> I'm fine with CVS, just point me to the location and help me get set
> up with an account.
> Please :)

Same for me, please. ;-)


>>> At the risk of being a bit of a killjoy... the only version control system
>>> supported by W3C's systems team (right now) is CVS, and while it's not
>>> ideal, I think it's more than ample for the simple needs of getting this
>>> book done.

Yes, CVS is more than adequate for the task in my opinion too.

I remind that TortoiseCVS [2], which provides a friendly user
interface for GUI adepts, is available for Windows users. :-)


Cheers,
 Helder


[1] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/
[2] http://www.tortoisecvs.org/

Received on Thursday, 15 October 2009 12:43:23 UTC