How to to contribute to W3C work? Quick Tips
Author(s) and publish date
- By:
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Karl Dubost
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- Published:
During the lunch break at the HTML in email workshop in Paris, a Web designer told me it was too expensive to participate to W3C work. This is a common myth about W3C. There are many ways to participate and be part of the Web standard efforts without necessary being a computing engineer and/or become a W3C Member.
In the next few weeks, I will introduce ways anyone can participate to W3C, without having to become a Member, and will explain how it benefits you and the Web communities. Let's start with the Quick Tips!
Quick Tips
Quick Tips (or Quality Tips) are Short, simple bits of knowledge for better Web design, authoring, and use, on quality issues related to W3C technologies such as HTML, CSS, HTTP.
The Tips are however not limited to these technologies: It is entire possible to write about SVG, Semantic Web, Web Services or anything related to the W3C technologies.
There is a very short set of guidelines for creating quick tips. When writing one, you should focus on a few things:
- Make it short
- Make it cool to read
- Make it useful for anyone
The Quick Tips are used on the Markup validator to give a short and quick readable information for Webmasters, and listed on this weblog. They are listed and can be used as reference materials for tutorials or in a Web agency, for example.
If your Web Site uses php, you can even include a block with random Tips with the following one-liner:
<?php include "http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/random_tip.inc"; ?>
It is a wide public exposure of your knowledge and skills (good karma) and it helps the community to benefit from your useful and simple recipes. Looking forward to your mails on public-evangelist@w3.org.
Next time, I will talk about tutorials.
I think you need to make the URL's for the random_tip.inc absolute
thank you.
Gicela
Gicela, good point. It's fixed now.
Very good this (and these) post(s).
Participate to a W3C work is time expensive, especially at the begining. The W3's website is too confuse to find some informations. When I joined the HTML WG I asked myself "What else?", no explanation, no links, I had to search for it. And it cost a lot of time.
hi,
could you fix the php script (http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/randomtip.inc), replacing
echo $rotatingtips[$rotchoicenumber];
with
echo $rotatingtips[$rotchoice_number-1];
, please ?
Right now : the script never return the first item, and crashes when he should display the last item...
Thanx !