how not to fix html ¶ personal weblog of joe clark, toronto

how not to fix html ¶ personal weblog of joe clark, toronto home about & contact subscribe search how not to fix html tim berners-lee decides to actually do something for a change. unfortunately, it’s the wrong thing. the perceived accountability of the html group has been an issue. he means the actual accountability. couching the issue in the term “perceived accountability” makes it seem as though tbl thinks the html working group is perfectly accountable and all he has to deal with is everybody else’s mistaken impressions. it’s everybody else’s impressions that determine whether or not the group is accountable. our opinions count, not theirs. an issue was the formation of the breakaway what wg, which attracted reviewers though it did not have a process or specific accountability measures itself. “accountability measures” like what? multinationals stacking the working group? holding working-group meetings in far-flung capitals on different continents so everyone is equally inconvenienced in attending? why is it that the html working group has a problem of “perceived accountability,” while what wg “did not have… accountability” at all? in what way does what wg not have a “process”? there has been discussion in blogs where daniel glazman, björn hörmann, molly holzschlag, eric meyer, and jeffrey zeldman and others have shared concerns about w3c works particularly in the html area. html is a topic of interest. but it isn’t an outright fiasco. html, in large part, works fine right now. even a site with tag soup and invalid html works in browsers. we know that such a site is no good technically. we are discouraging such sites – or at least those in the web-standards movement are; the w3c has barely helped us at all in that regard. even with those provisos, html pretty much works. meanwhile, wcag 1 is old; the wcag working group is the target of more suspicion, and the source of more hostility and outright mismanagement, than any other w3c group; and wcag 2, by consensus of nearly everyone not on that working group, is an outright failure. so we’re starting our fixes with html? why? because five people posted on their blogs about it? more than five people posted about wcag 2. why aren’t we starting there? html is working ok but web accessibility guidelines are in trouble. so why is html a priority fix? we had a w3c retreat in which we discussed what to do about these things. and how much discussion was had to abandon wcag 2? if we’re so concerned with process and accountability, how about a public answer to that question? how about publishing an accurate précis of the dialogue about wcag 2 at that retreat? some things are very clear. it is really important to have real developers on the ground involved with the development of html. it is also really important to have browser makers intimately involved and committed. and also all the other stakeholders, including users and user companies and makers of related products. that’s fine, but only w3c employees, members (capital m sic), and invited experts get to vote. “other stakeholders” can be and safely are ignored. even invited experts can be and safely are ignored. the plan is to charter a completely new html group. unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to html …which means that, with the w3c’s glacial processes, we’ll have a spec document to look at in 2010 and actual browser support in 2012. do you really think that web accessibility for people with disabilities will improve substantially in the time the w3c spends filing rough edges off a standard that, in broad terms, already works? we have strong support for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser makers …who will, in turn, dominate the process. (remember, a browser maker that is a member of the w3c has more clout than you do and has the same clout any multinational member does.) html isn’t the problem if you are under the impression that i am lending de facto support to what wg, i’m not. nor am i opposing what wg. my concern is that what wg is doing exactly what the w3c did. due in no small part to what wg’s leadership by a strict standardista with an interest in video games, “html5” replicates html’s obsession with computer-science and math elements. html has samp, var, and kbd. i use all of them and i am pretty much the only one who does. “html5” has meter (for measurements) and t for time notation. but, true to member biases, “html5” bans the use of dl–dt/dd for dialogue, a usage permitted by the html spec and in wide use by intelligent developers like me who have to mark up documents unrelated to computer science. (they’d prefer you use a thicket of blockquotes and cites. and, presumably, nullify all the indention and italicization that browsers will do by default.) this is a classic problem in html development: the people doing the work are geeks with computer-science interests who do not understand, for example, newspapers, or screenplays, or, really, print publishing in general. in some obscure way, they disdain print publishing, as the web is not print. indeed it isn’t, but print has structures the web doesn’t, and it doesn’t have them because people like these refuse to acknowledge they exist or simply refuse to consider them. years ago, and obviously unrelated to the as-yet-nonexistent what wg, i tried to explain to tantek that newspaper publishers desperately needed elements mappable to heds (perhaps the same as a heading), deks (not the same as a heading), and ledes (not the same as a paragraph or a span). tantek told me (e-mail, 2006.05.16): [t]he “print publications” crowd… cares much more about pixel precision, etc. they don’t (typically) bother to even mark up their headings using h1…h6. now, if there were a bunch of web pages today which were adaptations of print publications where they tried to use semantic markup as much as they could and then started using <div class=""> for semantics that html didn’t capture, then that would be evidence. of course there weren’t “a bunch of web pages today” that did so; the elements didn’t exist. and that proved the elements didn’t need to be invented. this attitude – still present in what wg, though it is separate and was formed later – can be summed up as “until we decide you are using our computer-science tags adequately, we won’t even consider the semantic needs of your documents.” i find the attitude ill-educated and uncultured. it’s comic book guy deciding what will and won’t be legal on your own web page. for “html5” and the new html variants, why can’t we just adopt what’s already been done in other namespaces, like the text encoding initiative and tagged pdf? yes, i really mean the latter. we assuredly could use elements from tagged pdf like: generic heading (present in “html5”) annotation note and reference for footnotes, endnotes, and sidenotes (not aside in “html5”) part, section and article (some in “html5”) caption generically applicable to tables and figures bibliographies, tables of contents, and indices (some in “html5”) nonstruct for generic groupings formula why not just borrow those? why give us a way to mark up measurements but no way to mark up structural elements in layouts like footnotes and deks? small fixes first i’m not even insisting on the adoption of those elements; they are presented for discussion, to show there is an approach that doesn’t require tbl’s new committee starting from scratch. and i know that ajax-style interaction needs new elements and attributes. i’m fine with that. i would even be fine signing on to “html5” if what wg made some changes. they’re a good example of a community group plugging a hole the w3c never noticed. nonetheless, aren’t the easiest fixes those that would make many nominally invalid documents valid and help accessibility? ban tables for layout. allow fragment identifiers to start with any ascii character, not just a letter. suddenly hundreds of millions of blogger comment urls become valid. allow multiple uses of the same id/label in a form and suddenly it becomes possible to mark up multiple-choice questionnaires accessibly. give us actual rowgroups (not just tbody) along with colgroups in tables and maybe browsers will begin to support both of them. (table headers also badly need fixing.) let us nest certain block-level elements in certain other ones right away, à la xhtml 2. a p really should be able to contain an ol. (and a dt really should be able to contain a p.) if you’re really intent on adding elements, add ones that already exist in the wild or used to exist in html. you don’t even have to look as far afield as tei or pdf. make embed legal. give it up, people: object doesn’t work and never will. give us back dir and menu. they used to be in html before the w3c decided that cern physics papers never need directories and menus. when do we take back the web from the w3c? do you really think that another committee from the “consortium” with a recent history of one screwup after another, and with serious structural compromises everywhere, is going to improve html? especially with such a late start? is improving html really that important? why? so we can mark up measurements or some other new things? why are measurements or other new things more important than, say, web accessibility? when do we take back the web from the w3c? linked & datestamped: 2006.10.28 16:39 category(ies): wcag2, web accessibility, web standards the foregoing posting appeared on joe clark’s personal weblog on 2006.10.28 16:39. this presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (if you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) the permanent link is: http://blog.fawny.org/2006/10/28/tbl-html/ adjacent postings← previousu garde itnext →raised-pinky design start ↑ search search wordpress archives only (april 2004 and later) values you enter are stored and may be published.    search everything else for earlier entries, and for anything else on fawny.org, search using a9:    site tools information about this weblog other weblogs homepage (and “business” site, joeclark.org) mailjoeclark commercial-at fawny dot org instant messagingcontenunu archives categories: about fawny.blog disturbing search requests accessibility audio description captioning cbc cinema accessibility dubbing pdf subtitling web accessibility wcag2 zoom layouts architecture b-links blind items cinema copyright design disability events @media london 2007 @media san francisco 2007 @media2005 an event apart san francisco 2007 atypi-2007 14 days to atypi: captioning 14 days to atypi: ttc iceweb 2006 mesh conference sxsw2005 w3c technical plenary 2005 wdn07 follow-ups freakonomics friends general graphic design iamw icebike iceland 2006 inversion bmb journalism lazyweb linguistics canadian english links liveblogging macintosh supremacy media micropatronage monetizing intelligence music oz photography photos splorpist rebuttals research screenshots south riverdale foundrydistrict leslieville sport(s) the print medium books magazines monocle spreads writing the weblog medium this is broken toronto megabins spacing-inspired spacing-publicspace street furniture ttc bay lower tttt tv type i saw today cooper black friz quadrata helvetica scripts signage text on things typography signs typecharter wayfinding web & infrastructure web standards failed redesigns by date: november 2007 october 2007 september 2007 august 2007 july 2007 june 2007 may 2007 april 2007 march 2007 february 2007 january 2007 december 2006 november 2006 october 2006 september 2006 august 2006 july 2006 june 2006 may 2006 april 2006 march 2006 february 2006 january 2006 december 2005 november 2005 october 2005 september 2005 august 2005 july 2005 june 2005 may 2005 april 2005 march 2005 february 2005 january 2005 december 2004 november 2004 october 2004 september 2004 august 2004 july 2004 june 2004 may 2004 april 2004 (older archives) you enjoy fawny.blog

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