2025‐01‐03

Minutes for Meeting January 3, 2024

Attendance (4): Mike Gower, Francis Storr, Giacomo Petri, Ken Franqueiro

Agenda

Discuss Scott's reflow PR (#4055), feedback, additions, etc.

Reflow

We had a high-level discussion on whether it is better to have a longer Understanding document or peel off much of this content into techniques.

• Giacomo: The existing continuity and descriptions are important for readers' understanding
• Mike: Not necessarily suggesting removing content outright, but supplementing it with examples, possibly relegating some instances of successive images there

Francis finds Non-text Contrast more useful now that it is longer and has more examples, including the table. But does think those would work better as techniques.

Francis aside: observation that working examples are not consistently constructed/styled; maybe something we can attend to in general sometime this year?

Mike: Should we think about where we'd want to link out to working-examples from Reflow?

• Ken: Currently we only ever link to working-examples from Techniques, never directly from Understanding; do we link to techniques anywhere besides Related Techniques?
  • Mike: There are a few cases where we do, but few and far between, e.g. Label in Name, Non-text Contrast, Consistent Identification
• Giacomo's 20x2 technique is very specifically applicable to one subsection
• Giacomo: The working examples are arguably more important than the technique
• Mike: one approach might be to make generic techniques capable of having as many working examples under as few umbrellas as possible?
• Examples that are specifically used (such as a carousel) should point to fairly constrained techniques; more abstract techniques can reside in the Sufficient techniques section?

Ken: The new version of reflow introduces a lot of h2's that are non-standard in Understanding docs; seems like those should be h3's under Intent

• Mike: A few pages have been adding subsections under Intent, e.g. Label in Name; would be worthwhile to assess how well this is working, and consider how deep we'd want the heading structure to go for the Reflow rewrite
• Mike will take a look at heading structure without touching content

Francis: thinking out loud, would it make sense to build up from basic to more complex examples? E.g. start with web page with a video on it. Move to web page with video and table. Web page with carousel; web page with carousel and video, etc. Make more complex pages out of more atomic reflow challenges.

• Giacomo: sometimes the simplest case doesn't represent real-world scenarios, and in the process of evolving the examples, refactoring may need to happen which makes them less straightforward. Right now, easy-to-understand working examples are not that useful for real case understandings.

Mike: there are text-only conventions that support text itself that requires two-dimensional presentation (poetry, code)