Slightly ajar

At the Web Directions South conference in Sydney, which I attended, Andy Clarke announced Ocean's CSS Eleven. Now this wasn't really a surprise to me (except the announcement), as I'd been in contact with Andy previously, suggesting the idea of forming some form of designer advisory board to the W3C. I even touched on this topic in a question to Håkon Wium Lie in the interview we had with him on CSS3.info.

I am surprised that no one from CSS3.info was invited, especially with all the work Peter puts in promoting CSS3, and it has been shown that the W3C listens to what the site has to say. I am slightly concerned how many links there are to Apple in the group, but none to the other browsers (one employee, one person that worked on Apple Canada, and one who's company writes and promotes a iPhone only site), unless you count John Hicks who did the Firefox logo and icons for a number of Mac browsers. Having said that, I have no problem with any of the people on the list, and they are all great designers that have promoted web standards, even if one did say Opera did nothing good except media queries during his talk in Sydney .

I do think the group is a good idea (obviously), but there has been some criticism that may need looking into when they have their site in shape. The group seems exclusive at the moment, instead of being a collective mouth piece for designers. I'm sure they'll have a way to gather feedback from designers at large, and the group will turn that feedback into comps and concrete suggestions, that will be reviewed before sending them off to the W3C for comment. I also think there needs to be a open election process after a set period, so the group isn't so self appointed, and people tat prove they are doing good work are appointed, and people that don't have the time to commit or want to leave (if this ever happens) are replaced. Another criticism is the lack of women in the group. This is a topic that often comes up about speaker roosters at conferences. I'd say I'm surprised that women like Veerle are not there, but to be fair these are the people that accepted to join, and we don't know who were asked but didn't have the time to commit to joining such a group, or were not interested for whatever reason. A diversity no one really mentions is the lack of ethnic diversity, and this is also shown with this group. Unlike the amount of women in the industry, apart from maybe people of Asian decent like Cindy Li or Khoi Vinh, there are not a lot of none-white well known designers to suggest. I could be wrong, and it is just that I don't know about them. I certainly hope this situation improves, as web design could do with the diverse styles that art forms like music benefits from with it's large ethnic diversity.

The reasons why I think this is a good step forward, and why I was interested in such a concept to begin with, is that there seems to be a lack of dialogue between those that use the standards (designers) and those that write them. I like to think I'm doing my part to bridge the gap between designers and those that implement the standards. There are a limited amount of designers on the working groups, and not only do most not have time to participate in the spec writing process, but following and understanding implementation issues is beyond the scope of why we need designers involved in the process. The form of communication, with having to search through mailing list histories to see if an issue or idea has been raised is also problematic. We do need a way that designers can get together and decide what they need to have in the spec, and define what a feature needs to be able to do (and look like if appropriate), and then the W3C and browser implementers can take these comps and requirements, and refine them into a implement-able standard. Currently, I assume most specs that deal with presentation are written by people that don't know for sure what designers want, and are not designers themselves. There is a risk that a lot of features will not be of much use to designers, and required features will be missing.

I certainly look forward to seeing CSS Eleven progress, and hopefully can get involved in sure way in the future. I've been soliciting feedback on what features of CSS3 designers want the most for a while, so I'd love to take some of the work that is generated back to Opera, so that we implement what is needed.