Wiki-based documentation project
Author(s) and publish date
- By:
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J. Alan Bird
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- Published:
Introduce myself
My name is Hiroki Yamada. I am a W3C Fellow from Internet Academy (Japanese company). Internet Academy is a school for Web Designers and Web Developers. I've been in charge of developing on curriculum and educational materials. And now, I'm working on making the wiki-based documentation of W3C specifications at W3C.
Background & Status
W3C has released a lot of specifications with rapid growth of the Web technology. Each specification is very large, which is a good thing. However, understanding specifications is difficult for beginners. In order to facilitate the learning process, we should train Web Designers and Web Developers from beginner to professional level. Achieving this goal is important for the growth and development of the World Wide Web. This is why I began this project.
I've finished developing two documents. The first document is the Educational Materials for Beginners, and the second is the List of HTML Elements. However, these documents are just a first step for this project, which is just beginning. We also have an Open Web Platform page. I will continue writing documentation for other specifications that relate to the Open Web Platform.
In this entry, I explain three features of the documentation of HTML.
HTML documentation's features
First, these documentations present the information simply. They must do this because the project's intended targets are only beginners in Web design. For beginners, specifications are not easy to read because they have too much information. My documentations contain only the basic information that beginners need. In addition, they present links to specifications that give insightful information. I have also continued to focus on keeping the educational materials both easy to read and easy to understand.
Second, they utilize many examples in order to better describe how HTML works. This is important because I think that it is difficult for a beginner to understand how the elements of HTML are used. For exactly the same reason, they also provide examples of bad HTML usage and screenshot images.
Finally, I set up a working web development curriculum for beginners since they don't know how to effectively organize their study. From here they can create a fake site according to the flow of the curriculum. And also, they cover not only HTML, but also provide instructions for the next step. I've finished editing the CSS Educational Materials for Beginners, so people who study Web technology can advance step by step from one level to the next.
I very much welcome bug reports and suggestions for improvements by sending feedback to the publicly archived mailing list public-webdev-docs@w3.org [Web archive].
One thing important to note is that the W3C wiki is open to anyone. You just need an account the same way, you would have an account on wikipedia.
You can get a public account on W3C site and starts edit the page. The more people contributing, the better for the quality of the content.
It's also an important site because it brings a vendor neutral resources about Web technologies.
Wikipedia skins for wiki are not excellent, it would be good if some skilled designers could experiment with a few skins too.
And last but not least, people also can create images for illustrating some concepts for some articles. Think for example about the CSS box model. :)
????? Hiroki for starting the work, that's great!
This is a great idea. Thanks Hiroki for starting this project.
Karl, I hope you are right about this effort bringing vendor-neutral resources, but we need to be vigilant.
hi Hiroki, thanks for blog . I read it detail. You does great job. I am also working as WEB Accessiblity Compatiblity Web Design and Develop. I am more interested on your work. This would be nice step for beginner learning html with your html beginner lesson
@sudarshan which kind of issues would you expect?
And what are your proposals to avoid them?
@Karl
Hi Karl, thank you for providing the additional information. I very much welcome anyone's joining to the editing work on this page.
@Sudarshan
Hi Sudarshan, thanks for your comment. I will continue making documentation for other specifications.
@Hira
Hi Hira, thank you for your comment. Please let me know if you have some advice for me.
hello, im very new to all this and find your comments interesting. i am starting a new web company in the uk, [redacted] and am wondering if there are any web designers that are w3c compliable that you could reccomend to me in the uk as your knowledge, i feel, is very great, many thanks.