in the beginning....

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... the list was formless and void. ;-)

open-hci is the result of a series of conversations that have gone on for 
many, many months primarily between Seth, JP and myself, with later input 
from Havoc and the knowledge of other developers, such as Waldo.

so, just WHAT was our hope and desire for this list? well, to start moving the 
UI guidelines of the projects closer together, and to start addressing UI 
issues collectively rather than seperately.

this does not mean we are aiming for mutual agreement on all things. but it 
will allow us, IMO, to pool talent, efforts and time, the bulk of which 
probably can benefit all projects out there.

ok, words and ideas and hand waving are nice, what do we need to do to get the 
ball rolling? here's a short list:

 o A web site. We need a small yet informative website that can detail what it 
is we're doing, the existence of this list and a place for us to link the 
results of our work from. We can host it at the neutral ground of 
freedesktop.org

 o Links. We need an HTML page that lists links to all of the existing 
documents so we have a starting point.

 o A document format. We need to settle (quickly) on a final document format. 
Docbook is a candidate, but we need to look at what sort of methodology we 
wish to employ. Do we want to work on both documents in parallel files, or do 
we want to work on folding both documents into one "metafile" that can be 
processed to present either a KDE- or GNOME- specific final result. The 
latter sounds more ambitious to me, but also perhaps a good way of doing 
things if only because it allows us to truly share the common parts of the 
resulting documents.

 o What documents we want to create. Personally, I feel that we should be 
aiming for a few different documents including:

     o a HIG document
     o a principles document

The principles document should cover the items that are truly implementation 
agnostic but important (the definition of a "sane UI" that Waldo mentioned 
earlier). I don't think we need to rewrite the book on usability (that's been 
done enough times) but I do think we should collect some basics.

personally, i'd really like to just "jump in and start swimming" but i know 
that we have some deffinition work to do first. but let's keep this part 
short, if possible, down to a week or two at the most and then get right into 
the business of creating the documents.

if you'd like to take on any of the above items (e.g. the web site or links 
page) please let us know and we can start moving on them ASAP.

- -- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"
    - Albert Einstein
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