Michael Thomas wrote:
Given that the Tools folk have created yet-another useful mechanism, making
each working group's page have a link to its related status information now
becomes a trivial effort, with substantial benefit.
Right, this is really cool -- although a link from the ietf wg page would be
nice, the tools version almost looks like wg page v2.0 with a few additions
(like the charter, milestones, etc.)
I hadn't thought of merging the existing wg page with the tools one. I also
never noticed that a pointer to the tools page is already on the official wg
page. It is right above "Chairs", slipping past the eye, after the Last
Modified date. I also had entirely missed just how rich the tools page is.
The Status page really has two innovations. One is the status information.
The other is the page format -- heading anbd side-column. Most IETF pages are
organized by information "topics". The user gets to figure out what topic to
query. And, of course, this is often obvious. Other times, not so much.
Although this one's heading uses topic terminology, it actually is organized for
working group participant *activity*. True activity-based design tends towards
use of verbs rather than nouns, but given the list of links at the page heading,
I think it covers all the things a participant would want to get at. (The fact
that the "charter" link is in the middle of the list, rather than the beginning,
is a pretty strong indicator that this is more oriented towards participants
than towards folks trying to find out about the wg. Of course, it serves the
latter folks just fine.)
Activity-based GUI design has become a point of focus in the Usability field and
seems to be far more productive that the classic style, which leaves it up to
the user to figure out how to combine info queries together, to get work done.
This page header should become the standard for all pages
relating to a working group.
(Whether to also make the left-hand column universal for wg-related pages could
be debated a bit. My first reaction was not to keep it, but the ability to jump
between wgs does seem pretty appealing, and the display real estate cost of the
feature isn't onerous.)
So my suggestions are:
1. Move these Status pages out of the "tools" development area and make them an
official part of a working group's "official" pages.
2. Make the header standard for *all* working-group specific pages.
3. Remove the documents list from the WG charter page, since it is redundant
with the Status page and less complete.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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