GEO Task Force
1st Face-to-Face Minutes
Boston, November 2002
acknowledgements - attendees - minutes
The first Face-to-Face meeting of the GEO Task Force was held on Friday and Saturday, 22-23 November, 2002, in Westborough,
Massachusetts, (a suburb of Boston). A teleconference was held on Wednesday 26th November to continue the discussions. Minutes of
that teleconference are also rolled into this document.
See also the pages for agenda and meeting logistics.
Special thanks to Whitney Quesenbery, our invited speaker, and to Matt May and Wendy Chisholm for contributing information about WAI
activities.
Thanks also to Steve Billings for scribing.
Participating in person
- Lloyd Honomichl, Lionbridge
- Richard Ishida, W3C (chair)
- Matt May, W3C (WAI)
- Russ Rolfe, Microsoft
- Steve Billings, Global360 (scribe)
- Tex Texin, XenCraft
Participating by phone
- Wendy Chisholm, W3C (WAI)
- Suzanne Topping, BizWonk
Regrets received
- Andrew Cunningham, State Library of Victoria
- Najib Tounsi, Ecole Mohammadia d'Ingénieurs
Other WG Members
- Isaac Mao, Tangram
- Chulkee Sung, SCO Group
Reading to Do - Creating Documents That Lead to Actions
Presentation by Whitney Quesenbery: Slides TBD.
WAI Overview
Matt May presented an overview (http://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/1118-jb-waiintro/ -
member only)
The group briefly reviewed the structure of some WAI deliverables:
Audience, usability, and subject areas
The discussion was centred around the Discussion Document prepared
beforehand. The numbers B.X.X refer to the numbered items in that document.
- Who are we targeting?
- B.1.1
- We agree on the basic principles. Lloyd wasn't sure he was bought in to the use of personas.
- B.1.2-3
- It is a little early to define potential users, we need to look at the material first, then regroup to consider which users we will
support. The FTF meeting in January would probably be a good time to address such issues.
- B.1.4
- http://www.w3.org/International/geo/plan/geo-scoping.html :
major customer types provides a non-exhaustive but useful framework to help us consider possible target users as we look at the material related to
three first deliverables
- Add designers and management types
- The auditor category should be aimed at architects also (site designers).
- Usability requirements
- B.2.1
- Agreed
- We’ll create techniques first, and then build guidelines on top of them later (linking to them). Internally, we may or may not end up
using rough guidelines as a starting point for deciding what techniques we need to cover. SB thinks we will, Russ doesn’t seem to think so; RR is
thinking we’ll start by going through the w3c spec and find things we need to talk about. Maybe we’ll do both using one to crosscheck the other.
- B.2.2
- B.2.3
- Agreed in principal, as long as we can define it well enough
- B.2.4
- B.2.5
- Agreed: we should store pointers separately from the main document
- Agreed: we will maintain a hints & tips type set of web pages, largely as a portal but occasionally containing information we've
put together
- Suggestions for content should be sent to the geo list so people can comment if they want to. Suggestions should generally include the
content to put up on the site.
- RI will maintain the hints & tips pages. This can contain spill over stuff not addressed by current work items.
- B.2.6
- B.2.7
- Agreed that we probably don’t need WAI-like checkpoints
- B.2.8
- Agreed: need one document, not split core vs. tech-specific
- General agreement on approach suggested and need for seamlessness for user, but we need to figure out how to implement it.
- B.2.9
- Agreed that we will need browser-specific support info
- We’re going to need to determine which browser/platform/version combos we’re going to be concerned with.
- B.2.10
- Good idea for later - need to develop ideas first.
- May address HTML Tidy or Validation tools.
- Later may develop something along ideas of ATAG.
- Lloyd worried that there's a difference wrt enforcement - they may not want to do i18n or there may be optional stuff - must be able to
turn it off.
- Steve asked should we introduce certification? Lloyd likes idea of certification
- B.2.11
- We should look for people with other language skills
- Translation vendors (eg. Lionbridge) may be able to help out
- Najib Tounsi is producing some guidelines wrt bidi support (in Arabic)
- Subject areas
- B.3.1
- Go for CSS 2.1
- Agreed: Initial deliverables will cover the following technologies
- HTML/XHTML (with the assumption that CSS is used)
- CSS - our prime focus will be CSS 2.1, but we will also take into account divergences in CSS 1.0 and CSS 2.0. We will also
incorporate information from CSS3 from the major modules that affect i18n.
- One newer technology (to be determined)
- B.3.2
- Decide in January on the 3rd specification we will address
- Wrt non-W3C technologies, we should try to get organisations to write their own guidelines - Russ could get ASP and ASP.Net guidelines
written by Microsoft
- We should also point to existing sources
- Lloyd proposed we should check we are pointing to authorised sites and try to get stuff from primary sources
- B.3.3
- Agreed: When dealing with an issue where available solutions are limited by the lack of support (eg. in browsers) of certain aspects of
W3C standards, we will
- Provide a solution that can be implemented using currently-available technology, but also
- Point out how the W3C standards should be implemented (by browsers in this example) to enable the better solution ('raise the
bar')
- We will need to clearly signpost stuff that is in the standard but doesn't yet work.
- B.3.4
- Provide links to other material
- Possibly occasionally refer to stuff in the guidelines
- B.3.5
- SB If w3c technology affects it we address it, otherwise not
- LH like to bounce around at Lionbridge and get their reaction
- Bring out point that helps localiser and thereby improves product
- Agreed: ITS is something that falls within our scope, and
would be interesting to cover. We are not yet sure whether or not it is appropriate as a near term work item.
- B.3.6
- LH worried about WAI being mandatory and ours not
- RI talk with Wendy about i18n stuff in WAI docs
Guidelines architecture
- We need to review wai’s requirements doc for setting up their content repository
- Start by writing requirements documents for the deliverables.
- Wcag 2 requirements document is available. Other groups have done requirements documents as well. Look at the latest wai reqts doc (sent
out Friday; Richard will pull from archives)
- Hopefully we will be able to develop a set of requirements and an architecture for guidelines in conjunction with WAI and other horizontal
groups within W3C (Device Independence, Usability, QA, MultiModal).
Education and Outreach
In this section Suzanne introduced some ideas and we
brainstormed some more.
- Multilingual Computing magasine could feature a regular report of work of group - possibly as articles
- MD press releases and news items on W3C home page
- should look at what items we can post there
- full press release comes out when deliverables are completed
- Press releases are a fair amount of work because of the translation involved. Only 2-3 per year. W3C Communication team is quite
careful about what goes out from W3C (and members of its committees, etc,) itself. An outsider can write about w3c without worrying about these
concerns.
- anyone can write about the work of the group but should be careful about appearing to represent the group - official stuff or stuff
purporting to represent the group should be checked by team and comm staff - spokesmen for the group should be team and perhaps chair
- outreach has two objectives: 1. telling people that we're here and what we're doing; 2. educating via subset articles / presentations
related to guidelines
- Looked at WAI gallery - might be useful, but not the highest priority
- We could create a suite of example sites, demonstrating both good and bad practices. This may be better than using real sites as
examples, because: we have control, it won’t change out from under us, and we can demonstrate anything we need to.
- Test suites or sites might be useful too
- Business Planning Document: We should create a document containing some relevant things for people to factor in when creating a business
plan: benefits of following GEO guidelines / costs of not following them.
- One possibility is to do something along the lines of WAI's "Customizing a Business Plan for Web Accessibility". Agreed to evaluate
this to see what value it could offer us.
- Another possibility is to do something similar to http://www.i18nguy.com/UnicodeBenefits.html.
- Suzanne offered to put some thoughts together on this.
- We could consider a survery of legal / regulatory requirements around the world
- Question about whether this is in scope and whether there are enough regulations out there relating to internet content
- Could be useful - seems like a huge research endeavour - but we could just provide examples - need to ensure that it's v clear that
this is only a set of examples - not exhaustive
- Any legal / regulatory considerations will get included in the business planning document. We won't provide a standalone document for
legal/regulatory considerations.
- Training materials and delivery
- A little early to worry about this
- Suzanne suggests outreach presentation rather than educational tutorial
- RR At some point down the road we need to look at getting stuff into universities
- Suzanne will put together a list of short term vs. long term goals related to education and outreach. She’ll send it to us for discussion.
- We'll put a “quick tips” card on our list of things to create after guidelines are available. These tips will point back to the
guidelines.
Team process and next steps
Decisions
- We’re all going to be responsible for pulling i18n-relevant stuff out of all specs (so read carefully and note relevant items).
- Specs to read:
- Conference calls (1 to 1.5 hours): Every Wednesday at:
- Seattle (GMT-8): 8am
- Utah (GMT-7): 9am
- Boston (GMT-5): 11am
- UK (GMT): 4pm
- Morrocco (GMT+1): 5pm
- China (GMT+7): 11pm
- During the first call, we'll continue going through the discussion document.
- Minutes should capture
- Decisions
- Action items
- Divergent opinions (that were outvoted)
- Richard will do take care of the minutes (we'll try it this way and see how it works)
- For now most communication can happen in plain text email. We should attach HTML if we need to send non-Latin-1 text. When we get into
producing real content, that should be in XHTML / UTF-8
- We should all start passing pointers to existing relevant guidelines (external to w3c) to Richard (first review the guidelines and include
your comments on them)
Other notes
- Teleconferences: weekly, for an hour or less.
- Use Mailing list for discussion between calls & meetings
- Go through xhtml and css specs for i18n info
- Merge discussion doc and decisions into a framework doc (reqts doc) Coordination: Richard
- Suzanne is doing stuff on E&O
- Wendy: document testable success criteria as you go along. Forces you to be sure what you’ve written can be interpreted unambiguously.
- Write stuff in valid Xhtml / utf-8 CSS
- Need to be sure it is validated (can do this on w3c website). Use htmltidy (download it from w3c) for final check. Xhtml Settings: Tidy
–xml –utf8 –m –wrap 150 –markup no %1 That’s a double – before markup no. That’s important. –xml means xml output.
- Recruiting: Approach the following people to see if they know of additional people who'd like to be on the Task Force:
- IBM: Mark Davis, Lisa Moore
- Apple: John Jenkins
- Oracle: Craig Cummings
- Sun: ask Andrea Vine who might be appropriate from Sun
- RWS: Yves Savourel
- Siemens: Nuray Aykin (putting out a book on i18n; UI design perspective)
- SAP: Christian Lieske: involved with XLIFF
- Should try to find more people from outside the U.S. Knows i18n (has experience). Not just here to learn. (Later: localization expertise)
Not overly technical.
- Next FTF: Seattle in January, 2 days, to audience
- Some coming Milestones:
- Read/research
- Continue through discussion document
- Requirements
The chair of the Internationalization Working Group is Misha Wolf (Reuters). The chair of the Web Services Task Force is Addison Phillips
(webMethods, Inc.). The staff contact of the Internationalization Working Group and the Web Services Task Force is Martin Dürst ([email protected]). The chair and staff contact of the the GEO Task Force is Richard Ishida ([email protected]).
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