Re: Reverting symlinks to Recommendations

On 19 Oct 2009, at 9:04 AM, Chris Lilley wrote:

> On Monday, October 19, 2009, 3:32:19 PM, Robin wrote:
>
> RB> On Oct 15, 2009, at 19:34 , Ian Jacobs wrote:
>>> We've completed the rollback. This includes:
>
>>> * latest version URIs restored
>>> * reformatted specs no longer appear in TR views, current status
>>> pages, or spec histories.
>
>>> Let me know if you see any issues.
>
> RB> Excellent, thanks a lot, and again many kudos for the rest of  
> the site!
>
> RB> Should we maybe have a BoF/quick session/beer/whatever about new  
> TR
> RB> templates at TPAC?
>
> That sounds like a good idea.
>
> The recent alteration of /TR had a similar effect to 'Last' Call,  
> i.e. it was the first time many of us took a serious look at the  
> proposed changes :)

My current thinking is this:

  * There were a number of things we wanted to accomplish via the  
rewritten TRs, including:

    - Providing dynamic status information
    - Simplifying the front matter ("nobody reads the status  
section!") while leaving the most important bits up front.
    - Providing useful context (links to tutorials, validators, etc.)  
on the right side
    - Integration into the rest of the site while retaining much of  
the branding of the original style.
    - Getting all this without changing pubrules requirements or  
authoring practices.
    - Giving multiple views of the specs (desktop, mobile, print) so  
that people could hide navigation.

    We set up the "print mode" for TRs to look almost exactly like the  
classic TRs (modulo minor formatting
    bugs we could fix in a matter of days). However, I doubt that most  
people realized this, and we didn't
    advertise it loudly. (Perhaps making the classic view the default  
view would have helped, but even then, the
    status section had migrated to the bottom.)

* I'm less inclined to do rewriting now that the editors have made  
clear how strongly they feel about our reformatting  specs after the  
editors have put on their finishing touches. Other valuable lessons  
included:  don't put non-w3c branding on specs@

* And so I would like to find another approach to providing some of  
the benefits mentioned above without any rewriting. For instance, we  
might offer a (prominently displayed) service where one can provide a  
spec uri (or get it through a link or pulldown) and a tool generates  
dynamically the currents status information, available tutorials, etc.

* We had not done this before because it is simply to get all the  
information at a URI rather than having to do the two-step of going to  
a service to get the information.

Thanks again for moving this discussion forward constructively.

  _ Ian

--
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)    http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel:                                      +1 718 260 9447

Received on Monday, 19 October 2009 15:13:18 UTC