Jonathan Leighton wrote:
This sounds great, but I have a few comments.
First off: Is there going to be -- or should there be -- guidelines about the layout. ie, do we want to stick with a single left column with a header and footer? Or are people allowed to use their creative judgement with this?
I think we should see what people come up with. However, if you would like it as painless as possible, I can modify the language to be "re-skinning" the website, that way it's known that the layout needs to remain the same.
On Thu, 2005-08-25 at 08:49 -0700, Joshua A. Andler wrote:
*All submissions must be standards compliant (XHTML 1.0 Transitional & CSS) and render the same across all browsers (within reason of course).
Why Transitional? I think this is a really bad idea; Transitional DTDs are designed for when you are *transitioning* from a previous standard. If the website is being completely redesigned there is *no* reason not to use a strict DTD, other than laziness.
Why 1.0 Transitional? Because that's what we currently use. A while back I had said I wanted to convert us to Strict 1.1, but that was shot down due to _some_ compatibility reason (I don't recall what it was offhand). I just didn't want to go there again or do anything that would make major changes without approval. If others think it's fine to do 1.0 or 1.1 Strict, by all means I'm all for changing it.
Also, it might be wise to mention the separation of content from presentation. It's perfectly possible to pull of an XHTML/CSS site using horrible non-semantic markup and using CSS just to change the fonts. But that would be stupid.
I think that as far as the XHTML/CSS stuff goes, yes it does need to have a separation of content and presentation... I personally assume it goes with the territory of XHTML & CSS 'best practices' and is fairly common knowledge. However, I'm not everyone else, so I will go ahead and make note that they are required to be separate.
Another thing is that it might be good to specify accessibility guidelines to aim for. Accessibility will *always* be down to human judgement to an extent, but it might be nice to say "try to follow the WCAG level 2" or something.
Accessibility is great, but inkscape isn't really the type of program that is able to cater to those with accessibility needs (namely visual needs, which is what they focus on most with accessibility). So, I can definitely specify that it needs to be accessible, it's just kinda overkill in this case (although basics like alt tags for images are good practice anyway, as are a couple other things accessibility brings to the table). So, does anyone want to chime in on what level of accessibility we should shoot for?
Finally, I think you absolutely must define the browsers in which is must perform well in. Surely you don't want to support NN 4? What about really uncommon browsers? It's better to have a list I think. (When I say "support" I really mean "serve CSS to".)
I do note that it should support all browsers within reason. If we start to specify which ones (except for maybe saying "all modern browsers"), it will start a flood of "what about obscure browser X version Y?" comments. And I think that the standards compliance will take care of Lynx. ;)
If you really feel I need to specify, what ones would you like for me to list? Mozilla 1.x, Firefox 1.x, IE 5.5+, Opera 7+, Safari, Konquerer, Epiphany... do you want lower version numbers? more browsers listed? what about TV based browsers? and mobile device browsers? what else?
Deadline: *September 15, 2005
I'd say this is slightly too soon myself.
We actually already extended it earlier today, I just hadn't reposted to the list. September 25 is the new date so it is one month from today (you can thank Cornelius for that). If you think it should be longer than a month, just let me know.
I will wait until I get a few of the above Qs answered before actually updating that journal entry. Thanks for the input!
-Josh