Re: web site content

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@cranesoftwrights.com>]

At 00/06/28 16:20 -0400, Carmelo Montanez wrote:
>     One of the assignments from the June 5 meeting was web site content.  I
>volunteered to take on that.  Please visit the following web site for some
>of my proposed ideas.

Thanks, Carmelo, for putting this together!

General comments:

(1) Because I live in a rural area and have only slow access (24Kbps, or 
21.6Kbps if it is raining) I surf with graphics turned off, relying on the 
textual content much like a blind person does.  Every image on every page 
is encoded in HTML without the required ALT= attribute; this means I have 
no idea what is supposed to be found in each of the graphics.

Hovering over the graphics of some pages (e.g. NIST page), I see there are 
some hyperlinks encoded therein.  There should be text-based links 
somewhere on the page for every link hidden in a graphic image (as you have 
done on the main page).

These suggestions are based on the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines 
regarding good HTML page design practices, found at http://www.w3.org/WAI/ 
... I think any HTML we post on the web should follow these guidelines.

(2) We were given the layout and appearance of committee pages by OASIS ... 
perhaps this content that has been developed can be squeezed into the 
stylesheets given to us.  I'm not sure how tight OASIS will ask us to keep 
to this old format (the same one used for XML conformance), but I don't 
think we should vary too much away from it.  Much like other documentation 
projects, we've been given a format, all we need develop is the 
content.  Download the existing index.html file and the associated 
committee.css file referenced by the metadata tag to see what is there 
now.  I, personally, don't like what we've been given by OASIS looks like, 
but that is what I was given to use.


XSLT/XPath Conformance Testing

(1) - XML is properly spelled out "Extensible Markup Language" ... this has 
repeatedly been emphasized by Jon Bosak in his own presentations ... the 
use of "eXtensible" is *not* according to the W3C practices

(2) - the first paragraph refers to XSL instead of XSLT

(3) - perhaps change "a subset of the original XML document" to be "a 
subset of the original XML vocabulary or any other arbitrary XML vocabulary"

(4) - there are a number of double spaces that break up the flow of the 
paragraphs

(5) - "Xpath" is properly spelled as "XPath" according to the Recommendation

(6) - "on April 2000" should be "in April 2000"

(7) - I don't think the phone numbers are necessary, but if you want to 
include them, I believe the international representation of North American 
phone numbers is along the lines of +1(613)489-0999 because "1" is the 
international country code for North America.
  - I would rather we only have a generic address like 
"XSLT-XPath-Conformance@CraneSoftwrights.com" (which I hope we could change 
to @oasis-open.org ... I have just asked OASIS to set this up for us)
  - when the FTP depository is established, we can include that address as well

The NIST Test Suite Harness

  - no comments here

Test Suite Taxonomy

  - no comments here ... we can update this when we make decisions; perhaps 
even include an XML instance of each of the Recommendations with our 
granular ID values for referencing from tests, and a sample stylesheet 
doing the Recommendation Linking  ... this way submitters can test their 
test file references to the Recommendations

Documents and suite customization

(1) - would these just be example reports?  I wouldn't want to imply they 
might be the only reports ... some discussion of how they are generated by 
the user would be important

(2) - I like the idea of another page documenting the questions (though the 
DTD we provide should have detailed documentation as well)

Committee Members

(1) - my surname is "Holman" not "Hollman"
  - perhaps put the fact that I am the committee chairman on the second 
line, since JR has an academic suffix (I wouldn't want to use the same 
convention for the chair's position)

(2) - John's surname is "Evdemon" not "Edvanton"

(3) - perhaps order the names by surname

Members only working area

(1) - I think this doesn't need explaining, it could just be a link to 
"work.html" which is the page itself

(2) - due to recent PAC decisions, *all* work of the committee shall be 
open to the general public, therefore, there is no longer a 
username/password needed to access the work page.



Thanks again, Carmello!

............... Ken

--
G. Ken Holman                    mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
Crane Softwrights Ltd.             http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/m/
Box 266, Kars, Ontario CANADA K0A-2E0   +1(613)489-0999   (Fax:-0995)
Web site: XSL/XML/DSSSL/SGML services, training, libraries, products.
Book: Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath ISBN1-894049-04-7
Next instructor-led training:    2000-09-19/20,2000-10-03,2000-10-04,
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