Re: W3C CSS Home Redesign RFC

Stewart Brodie wrote:

> Fast, easy access to the actual specification documents is very
> important to me.  That is why I like the 2.1 link on the panel on the
> right hand side.

Yet, the linked resource says:

"This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other 
documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other 
than work in progress."

As long as the W3C has such a chaotic system of pseudospecifications, the 
situation should be made very clear. We have CSS 1 (official, but obsolete), 
CSS 2 (official, but obsolete), CSS 2.1 (not official, but taken as the 
surrogate for an excuse for a de facto standard, in lack of anything else), 
and CSS 3 (collection of drafts). Any "quick" links that obfuscate this are 
just dirty, not quick.

And in such a setting, you might just as well start with the most important 
in practice, CSS 2.1, mention CSS 3 next, and CSS 1 and CSS 2 as historical 
(though formally as _the_ specifications).

> I think it's too much to have it all on the front page, to be honest.

The current front page is overcrowded, and so is the new proposal. It's 
pointless to consider what should be removed. Instead, one should consider 
what is the content (including links) that absolutely _must_ be there. It 
won't be much.

Surely a long What's New list doesn't belong there - it's soooo 1990ish and 
amateurish. One or two latest news might be OK, with a link to a history 
page of news.

Even the text paragraph on the front page is too long. After the first 
sentence, which is OK apart from the word "simple" (give me a break! try to 
explain the cascade so that at least 10% of authors has a remotely correct 
idea of it, before calling CSS "simple"), it's just a verbose explanation of 
navigational links. Apparently this is because the navigation is not 
expected to stand on its own. Then the solution is to fix it, not to add 
explanations that try to cover some of the navigation.

Actually the front page could be nice, useful, fit on a screenful (or half 
thereof), and constitute a good starting point, if most of its content were 
removed - including the iconolatric nonsense at the end that shows _bad_ 
example of polluting pages with pomposities that lack any relevance to 
visitors. On _this_ very page, for example, "Made with Cascading Style 
Sheets" could make marginal sense - if it were not obvious how ridiculous it 
is to state something that obvious and if it did not give _bad_ example.

Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 14 November 2007 17:24:21 UTC