Re: Applying design to W3C specs

> Hi Ben,
> 
> On May 17, 2010, at 13:57 , Ben Schwarz wrote:
> > I recently gave a presentation here in Melbourne titled "Take back the web" (http://www.slideshare.net/benschwarz/take-back-the-web)
> > It discusses (there are notes on the presentation) that the W3C needs the presence of professional designers and further real world use cases.. 
> 
> That's certainly very true. That being said, it's not something that W3C (whether by that you mean the actual organisation or the community of people who contribute to W3C-approved standards) can do much about on its own. I'd actually like to reverse your claim: professional designers need to show up and make themselves heard as part of the W3C community. Standards are made by those who show up.
> 
> > Taking on this challenge personally, I teamed up with my business partner to focus on applying some typography to the existing W3C specifications.
> > We offered it as a userscript and wrote about it on my blog. 
> > 
> > http://www.germanforblack.com/articles/moving-towards-readable-w3c-specs
> > 
> > I'd really like to see a W3C response from my recent commentary and would like to open up for some discussion in this area.. 
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by "a W3C response". I don't speak for W3C but I'm responding anyway because improving the production of W3C specifications has been a topic of interest of mine for a while.
I think we were most interested in hearing what people involved with the W3C's thoughts were on what we've done.
So, I think this counts.
> 
> But before we jump into a discussion of style, I think that we should take a step back and first come up with a set of typographic conventions to be used by all (new) specifications, which could then be styled. Doug took a stab at listing some of these (the document is known to be missing conventions for APIs, but that can be looked at later). I'd be interested in knowing what your opinion is, and if you have any suggestion:
> 
>   http://www.w3.org/People/Schepers/spec-conventions.html
> 
> Note that if a redesign happens, it probably won't apply retroactively to documents already published in /TR/ as it would be likely to break them. When the W3C website was redesigned last year, a redesign of the specification style was also made (it eventually proved to have too many issues and was pulled, though I believe interest remains). Retroactively applying it to published documents was, erm, unpopular.
I think a new stylesheet is all that is needed here.
The majority of the specs are incredibly well-formatted html (even the much older ones) and the amount we could achieve with a minimal overwrite stylesheet was enormous. I think Doug's conventions would definitely be a step in the right direction, but a consistently and considered stylesheet could make a big difference even with the existing specs.
> 
> Finally, I don't know if public-html is the right place for this discussion (though I don't mind either way, I leave that up to the chairs). If it keeps going, it might be better fit for spec-prod (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/spec-prod/). It's fully public; it hasn't seen much traffic but nothing says it can't have more going forward.
I have CC'd it into spec-prod as well.
> 
> Thanks for contributing!
Thanks for the feedback!
> 
> -- 
> Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/


— Anthony Kolber