Re: W3C Spec Restyle Phase II

On Tue, 2012-07-03 at 12:25 -0700, fantasai wrote:
[...]
> Here's the result:
>    http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/design/w3c-restyle/

and the template from Karl,
http://www.la-grange.net/2011/12/05/w3c-spec-status-prototype


> 
> There's a lot more metadata than what Karl had represented, so we
> couldn't do exactly his design, but we tried to get close.

I don't think Karl's design scales up to this much metadata. It works
only because it's simple.

It's great to see this moving forward.

Here are some specific comments:

(1) the table rules/lines are much more prominent in the brown-on-yellow
version than in Karl's. Hmm, no, wait, that's because you don't set the
background and text colour everywhere. Switching to different default
styles in the browser...
I'd lose some of these lines. Get rid of the vertical rule between
Editors and Daniel (all the way down).

(2) Daniel and www-style have extra whitespace in front of them.

(3) The text (both blue and grey) may be too light for WCAG 2
compliance, not sure. W3C has moved to a "faded by being in the sun too
long" sort of gradient on the home page, with a darker blue for
headings, and that blue would probably work better.

(4) The link to CSS WG is clutter at top right and should go. Karl's
positioning made it clear that the document was produced by that WG,
whereas this does not make that clear.

(5) Suggest change "Candidate Recommendation" to "W3C Candidate
Recommendation" in the links at top and in the note, to make it clearer.

(6) I don't think crossing out former editors is appropriate - move them
to an appendix perhaps. The text needs to be understood even when CSS is
not applied, or when the document is printed, or read out loud. Agree
it's cute though :-)

We should really have an accessible cross-domain way for pepole to give
feedback, even if it's a front end for sending email or entering a
bugzilla comment.

(7) Agree with Ian that Paraphernalia isn't a good word. Usage might be
better.

(8) There should be a copyright statement there, e.g.
Copyright | W3C _details..._

(9) there's too much space under the headings, e.g. Status and
Advancement. It should ideally have the same distance from the baseline
of "Status" to the baseline of "A candidate Rec" as the line spacing in
the paragraph, so that it becomes part of the text that follows, instead
of floating in space.

(10) I like the limits on line length (I hope diagrams and tables can
extend into the margins though!).

(11) some of the links are black and some are blue underlined in black
and some are blue with no underline and some are black with no
underline. Where there's a mixture the text looks cluttered.

(12) under implementation there are some bold numbers(1), (2) and (3)
that stand out more than anything else between CR Exit Criteria and
Changes. If they are the most important things they should be headings
insead of "independent" "interoperable" and "implementation" - I suspect
they should just not be in bold.

(13) a rule at the end of the document, perhaps with a "back to top",
would make it clearer that the end of the document had been reached.

(14) although I like the typographical effect of the headers, I think in
fact sections do need to be numbered, especially in longer documents.
XML Query in this format would be awful without numbers. The numbers
could be grey and in the left margin when there's room.


> 
> In a later phase we'll pass this off to people with actual design
> skills (i.e. not me), so while I'll try to address any comments on
> the visual design, it is not the focus here. (Do not expect the final
> result to look anything like this mockup.)

oops, missed this paragraph before, sorry! Well, I hope some of these
comments are of use.

Liam

> ~fantasai
> 

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Tuesday, 3 July 2012 20:44:53 UTC