Re: New W3C Web Site Launched

First, congratulations on the redesign work. I agree with danbri that the  
site is a major treasure and needs to be handled with great care, and so  
any serious improvement on a site-wide basis is a brilliant achievement -  
even one that isn't yet finished.

And then...

On Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:28:17 +0200, Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org> wrote:

>  On the question of "google on every page" we discussed this issue quite  
> a bit. We certainly don't have the resources to write our own search  
> engine. And offering N search options to users (in a gesture to be more  
> neutral) is not really a service to users. We talked to google about  
> dropping their logo requirement and they let us know that that would not  
> be possible.

And elsewhere, he said:

> Having a search box on a Web site is considered standard practice, as I
> understand it. One of the goals of the redesign was to stick pretty
> close to common good practices for (all) sites. We still do some things
> differently.

> For instance, we use basic auth (if I recall) for logins rather than
> having a separate login page.

Also, unlike most other organisations W3C has a policy (part of its  
agreement with members) that it will behave in a vendor-neutral way.  
Choosing to advertise some products, while generally rejecting the quite  
common approach to making money of accepting advertising in appropriate  
places, doesn't seem to line up with that.

As well as using basic auth, you could provide a link to your search page,  
which has the box. Or open a public call for search engine service, with a  
criterion being that you will *not* provide advertising on every page, and  
see if you get alternatives. There are a lot of search providers out  
there. And as Art said, if I wanted a google search it isn't hard to do it  
 from most browsers already.

And in the original thread was also

>  Regarding twitter and identi.ca, we are already using 2 rather than  
> one. If we end up setting up our own microblog service at W3C, then we  
> might promote it instead. But all of that would require more resources  
> than we have currently allocated.

And why those two, and not a set of all those available from member orgs,  
or a randomly rotating set (as per the home page ads), or something?

EVERY time W3C makes a technology choice, people watch. And  
vendor-neutrality is important. Giving a couple of sites ads on  
everywhere... (oh wait, I am repeating myself. But I think it is  
important. We the rest of the members are probably not intersted in paying  
you guys to exclusively advertise a few services).

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Thursday, 15 October 2009 17:04:42 UTC