On Tue, 18 May 2010 02:04:25 +0200, John Foliot <[email protected]>
wrote:
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..
Taking on this challenge personally, I teamed up with my business
partner to focus on applying some typography to the existing
W3C specifications.
...
At first pass, my largest issue is one of color palette, and specifically
many of those shades of teal/blue and white, which do not provide
sufficient contrast between foreground and background;
Agreed.
...
I would also suggest that the table used for the "Property Index" (near
the end of the page) could likely use some vertical rules as well (either
via the table rules attribute, or by styling the individual <td>'s with
side borders): this lengthy table requires scrolling to view in its
entirety and providing the vertical rules would assist both low vision
users as well as many users with cognitive perception issues keep track
of each column. While less severe than the color contrast issue, I would
offer it to you as something to consider.
On the plus side, I appreciate the controlled line-length, the enhanced
leading, and the fact that you've left well-enough-alone with the default
font-size (a huge issue for the majority of the 80% font-sized web). So
thanks for that!
Agreed.
Finally, I suspect that there is a 'branding' requirement to keep the W3C
Document Status indicator on the page (the Vertical Blue bar at the top
left corner) - this might not be something that can be dismissed that
easily.
It isn't branding as such, it is part of setting expectations about what
the document is. There are still people who think "it's on the W3C site,
it must be a standard" when in fact no such rule applies - there is stuff
that is very experimental, or has even been abandoned, that is there for
historical reasons.
I understand that spec text is generally somewhere between impenetrable
and incomprehensible - this is actually one of the major problems of
writing specs. Something that I think would be seriously helpful is more
illustrations (you know, pictures) of stuff that is curently only
described in dense complex text that often fails to communicate its
meaning to the people trying to understand it.
This is important at the draft stage - if we miss something in a draft
because the text is too complicated, then it is unlikely it will get fixed
in a final version (less unlikely now we have the Candidate Recommendation
phase, but still not highly probable).
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
