[Usability][ANNOUNCE] open-hci freedesktop org

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

Dear all,

Seth Nickell (GNOME Usability Project), Havoc Pennington (Free Desktop, 
GNOME), and JP Schnapper-Casteras (Free Desktop Accessibility Working
Group) and myself have been discussing the possibility of co-locating
the KDE and GNOME Human Interface Guides (HIGs).

The plan as discussed thus far is to have the two documents co-inhabit
one XML document. Within this document, each HIG will have its own
sections as appropriate and will remain available for separate viewing.
The goal is to have one URL (on www.FreeDesktop.org) and one document
for developers to go to for KDE and GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. 
We hope this site can eventually house guidelines for multiple desktops
and graphical toolkits.

The easier we can make it for developers to discover and follow such 
guidelines the better it will be for Open Source desktops in general.
Since KDE apps are often run on GNOME and vice versa, developers should
be able to easily reference the guidelines for all the desktops they
expect their app to be run on.

Having a shared document will also allow us to start looking at
commonalities between the documents and perhaps create common chapters
or sections on basic guidelines and lessons that are desktop and
toolkit-independent (e.g., accessibility and internationalization tips,
general usability principles).

It will take some work to merge the documents, create a web site, and
raise awareness about the site for developers and people working on
other non-KDE non-GNOME HIGs. If you wish to join us in these efforts,
please subscribe to the open-hci freedesktop org email list via the web
interface at:

  https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/open-hci/

Best wishes to everyone!