Ben Schwarz joins CSSWG

The better part of a year ago I decided to make a bookmarklet that improved the display of W3C specifications.

To my surprise and delight people took notice, including some of my heros. Fast forward 8 months, I released "HTML5 for developers", a specification that was built to remove the "unimportant implementor details", enhance readability, be searchable, and function even when offline.

Since then, I've had a number of enlightening conversations about the future of the web with developers, browser implementors and working groups, but now more than ever it's clear that we need to improve communication as a community, by using design.

The W3C agrees, and have invited me to join the CSS working group to continue my work in a more collaborative, consultative manner.

I'll be working with the likes of Vincent Hardy, Divya Manian and Elika Etemad. Vincent is the author of the "CSS Shaders" specification (probably the most exciting specification under works), and Divya and Elika have both worked on improving CSS Working Group’s visual design.

Firstly, we'll experiment with the design of the CSS Shaders draft and do some R&D on less stylistic features (like offline, search, inline bug tracking, and many others). We'll endeavour to share our working process with the community at large.

Hopefully this is the start of a successful emergence of communication for all of us — as web makers.

Our hope is to get feedback from this early work and then find a way to make it available on a wider set of specifications, beyond the initial work we are doing on the CSS Working Group technical documents.

For now, please leave your questions and commentary on the www-style mailing list, or get in touch with me directly.

Ben Schwarz

germanforblack.com, @benschwarz on twitter, google+ and github.