Month: August 2009

Categories
Burningbird Just Shelley

Crickets: Comments, HTML5, and Drupal 7

I did turn the comments back on for the post, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer: RDFa and HTML5’s Microdata. Well, until the post gets overrun by spam, or until the crickets chirping drive me batty, whichever happens first.

My idea of comments on this site, and redirecting from the others didn’t work. It left people confused, and the connection ended up being overly complicated. I figured, when it seems right to open comments, I will.

Speaking of communication, it’s always fun to read stuff like the following in the WhatWG IRC logs:

[23:02] TabAtkins: Like, okay, I dislike Shelley Power. I *really* dislike her. But she performs a very valuable service by strongly disagreeing with stuff, and offering reasons why she disagrees that you can actually address. I rarely agree with her reasons, but I can *understand* them, and that’s really useful to have.

Probably one of the many reasons why the HTML WG is not a place for me. Oh, not so much the acrimony, though lordie knows there’s a lot of that. But, for better or worse, I’m a writer. I may not be the best writer. I’m certainly not the most successful writer. But writing is how I best contribute back to the tech world. I can do more, writing in my space, then I ever can on the HTML WG.

Including writing about my newest experiments with Drupal 7. Yes, I’m walking on the wild side, and have installed a Drupal 7 site. I am über geek woman, hear me type.

Categories
Critters

Saying good-bye to an old friend

Yesterday we spent several hours at the veterinary hospital with our cat of 18 years, Zoe. In a week’s time she went from being an older but still happy and healthy kitty, to one where she is no longer eating, and now drinking.

Our regular vet was not on duty, but the vet we had was excellent—not making any assumptions, not pushing any tests. Because of Zoe’s age, most aggressive forms of treatment are not an option, but we still decided on x-rays and blood work, as well as a urine test, to see if we could find what’s happening, and if what she had was treatable.

Zoe has fluid surrounding her lungs. What caused it could show up in the blood tests, or we could do a biopsy of the fluid. The latter is very unpleasant, so that’s not an option we’re most likely going to pursue. We were going to see what the blood work shows, but little girl is degrading so quickly that our choice has now been limited to one, though it’s not a choice I’m having an easy time with.

While we waited the test results, the vet injected water subcutaneously to help with hydration, and we took Zoe home. The vet also gave her a b12 shot, and an antibiotic, just in case there’s an infection somewhere. I tried to tempt her with her favorite poached salmon, but she wasn’t interested. She had a couple of licks of chicken baby food from my finger, but now won’t eat anything else. She won’t drink water, either.

It’s 3 in the morning. I just went downstairs, where my roommate is sleeping in his chair, Zoe on his lap, covered with a blanket. She greeted me weakly, but can’t get up. I’ll let them both sleep until morning, and then do what I need to do. Many of you who have known me all the many years I’ve had a weblog of some form or another, also know Zoe. I thought you might want to know.

Picture of Zoe

Categories
Healthcare

Whole Foods, healthcare, and boycott

I find it fascinating to watch what happens when progressives discover what kind of a person the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, is. Because his stores sell organic and healthy products, people automatically assumed he was a progressive like themselves. However, Mackey is the worst of fanatical libertarians, though it was only with the recent Wall Street Journal OpEd he wrote that people discovered this for themselves.

In the OpEd, Mackey came out against anything but a free market healthcare system. He states, unequivocally, that in his opinion, healthcare is not a right.

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America.

Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.

I leave those in other countries to respond to what Mackey says about your countries, and focus on what he said about this country.

Mackey lists changes he believes will solve the healthcare problems, including removing items that insurance companies are mandated to provide, allowing cross-state insurance sales, as well as tort reform.

However, as articles, such as this excellent article on healthcare costs in the New Yorker detail, healthcare costs are not driven by malpractice lawsuits, or government mandated health care coverage. If anything, the only thing has kept some small control over the healthcare companies are the state laws that don’t allow them to arbitrarily cancel healthcare coverage for the sick, and those who need care—that demand a minimum of responsibility from these companies.

Healthcare in the US has become nothing more than an exercise in earning profits. Until it’s redefined to what it should be, the care of people, costs will continue to increase exponentially, until eventually only the wealthy will be able to afford truly decent health care. The free market fails when it comes to basic humanity.

According to Mackey, if you’re sick and you can’t afford healthcare, why you should just die. I don’t know about any of you, but I have no interest in giving a man like this the time of day, much less my money. I have disliked Whole Foods with a passion for many years, both because of Mackey’s attitude, and the fact that the company grossly overcharges for its goods. To Mackey, organic and healthy are green marketing, a way to make lots of money.

Now others are discovering the truth of Whole Foods and Mackey, and have started a boycotting campaign, though how well it will do, is anyone’s guess. People have to make choices if they want to live what they believe, and that includes choosing where they spend their money. I can do without the “progressive” whose beliefs are nothing more than Twitter tweets and social media bon mots, and who isn’t willing to put their buying choices behind their beliefs.

But this is an easy one for me, because I’ve been boycotting Whole Foods for years.

update Good Good OpEd piece on this discussion at the NY Times. There are a lot of folks saying, but he’s so environmentally helpful, and has led the green revolution, and so on. Well, I look at it this way: he’s been amply rewarded for this effort. From now on, any money I give the store is payment for his latest efforts, and they have been both anti-union and now anti-healthcare. Whole Foods is not the only game in town when it comes to the environment. Not anymore.

Categories
HTML5 RDF

HTML5, RDFa, and the Beatles

How is the ongoing debate about HTML5/Microdata and RDFa like a Beatles’ song? Read more at Bb RealTech: Maxwell’s Silver Hammer: RDFa and HTML5’s Microdata.

I’ve turned comments back on, at least until I get overrun by spam, or the crickets get too loud.

Categories
Semantics

Maxwell’s Silver Hammer: RDFa and HTML5’s Microdata

Being a Beatles fan, I must admit to being intrigued about the new Beatles box set that will be available in September. I have several Beatles albums, but not all. None of the CDs I own have been re-mastered or re-mixed, including one of my favorite songs, from Abby Road: Maxwell’s Silver Hammer:

Joan was quizzical; Studied pataphysical
Science in the home.
Late nights all alone with a test tube.
Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Maxwell Edison, majoring in medicine,
Calls her on the phone.
"Can I take you out to the pictures,
Joa, oa, oa, oan?"

But as she's getting ready to go,
A knock comes on the door.

Bang! Bang! Maxwell's silver hammer
Came down upon her head.
Bang! Bang! Maxwell's silver hammer
Made sure that she was dead.

I love the chorus, Bang! Bang! Maxwell’s silver hammer came down upon her head…

Speaking of Bang! Bang! Jeni Tennison returned from vacation, surveyed the ongoing, and seemingly unending, discussion on RDFa as compared to HTML5’s Microdata, and wrote HTML5/RDFa Arguments. It’s a well-written look at some of the issues, primarily from the viewpoint of a heavy RDFa user, working to understand the perspective of an HTML5 advocate.

Jeni lists all of the pushback against RDFa that I’m aware of, including the reluctance to use namespacing, because of copy and paste issues, as well as the use of prefixes, such as FOAF, rather than just spelling out the FOAF URI. Jeni also mentions the issue of namespaces being handled differently in the DOM (Document Object Model) when the document is served as HTML, rather than XHTML.

The whole namespace issue goes beyond just RDFa, and touches on the broader issue of distributed extensibility, which will, in my opinion, probably push back the Last Call date for HTML5. It may seem like accessibility issues are the real kicker, but that’s primarily because no one wants to look at the elephant in the corner that is extensibility. Right now, Microsoft is tasked to provide a proposal for this issue—yes, you read that right, Microsoft. When that happens, an interesting discussion will ensue. And unlike other issues, whatever happens will take more than a few hours to integrate into HTML5.

I digress, though. At the end of her writing, Jeni summarizes her opinion of the RDFa/namespace/HtmL5/Microdata situation with the following:

Really I’m just trying to draw attention to the fact that the HTML5 community has very reasonable concerns about things much more fundamental than using prefix bindings. After redrafting this concluding section many times, the things that I want to say are:

  • so wouldn’t things be better if we put as much effort into understanding each other as persuading each other (hah, what an idealist!) so we will make more progress in discussions if we focus on the underlying arguments so we need to talk in a balanced way about the advantages and disadvantages of RDF or, in a more realistic frame of mind:
  • so it’s just not going to happen for HTML5
  • so why not just stop arguing and use the spare time and energy doing?
  • so why not demonstrate RDF’s power in real-world applications?

My own opinion is that I don’t care that RDFa is not integrated into HTML5. In fact, I don’t think RDFa belongs in HTML5. I think a separate document detailing how to integrate RDFa into HTML5, as happened with XHTML, is the better approach.

Having said that, I do not believe that Microdata belongs in the HTML5 document, either. The HTML5 document is already problematical, bloated, and overly complex. It encompasses too much, a fault of the charter, as much as anything else. Removing the entire Microdata section would help, as well as several other changes, but we’ll focus on the Microdata section for the moment.

The problem with the Microdata section is that it is a competing semantic web approach to RDFa. Unlike competition in the marketplace, competition in standards will actually slow down adoption of the standards, as people take a sit-back and see what happens, approach. Now, when we’re finally are seeing RDFa incorporated into Google, into a large CMS like Drupal 7, and other uses, now is not the time to send a message to people that “Oops, the W3C really doesn’t know what the fuck it wants. Better wait until it gets its act together. ” Because that is the message being sent.

“RDFa and Microdata” is not the same as “RDFa and Microformats”. RDFa, or I should say, RDF, has co-existed peacefully with microformats for years because the two are really complementary, not competitive, specifications. Both can be used at a site. Because Microformat development is centralized, it will never have the extensibility that RDF/RDFa provides, and the number of vocabularies will always, by necessity, be limited. Microformats, on the other hand, are easier to use than RDFa, though parsing Microdata is another thing. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Regardless, there’s no harm to using both, and no confusion, either. Microformats are managed by one organization, RDFa by the W3C.

Microdata, though, is meant to be used in place of RDFa. But Microdata is not implemented in any production capable tool, has not been thoroughly checked out or tested, has not had any real-world implementation that I know of, has no support from any browser or vendor, and isn’t even particularly liked by the HTML WG membership, including the author. It provides only a subset of the functionality that RDFa provides, and necessitates the introduction of several predefined vocabularies, all of which could, and most likely will, end up out of sync with the organizations responsible for the extra-HTML5 vocabulary specification. And let’s not forget that Microdata makes use of the reversed DNS identifier that sprang up, like a plague of locusts, in HTML5, based on the seeming assumption that people will find the following:

com.example.xn--74h

Easier to understand and use then the following:

http://example.com/xn--74h

Which, heaven knows, is not something any of us are familiar with these last 15-20 years.

RDFa and HTML5/Microdata, otherwise known as Issue 76 in the HTML 5 Tracker database. I understand where Jeni is coming from when she writes about finding a common ground. Finding common ground, though, presupposes that all participants come to the party on equal footing. That both sides will need to listen, to compromise, to give a little, to get a little. This doesn’t exist with the HTML5 effort.

Where the RDFa in XHTML specification was a group effort, Microdata is the product of one person’s imagination. One single person. However, that one single person has complete authorship control over the HTML 5 document, and so what he wants is what gets added: not what reflects common usage, not what reflects the W3C guidelines, and certainly not what exists in the world, today.

While this uneven footing exists, I can’t see how we can find common ground. So then we look at Jeni’s next set of suggestions, which basically boil down to: because of the HTML WG charter, nothing is going to happen with HTML5, so perhaps we should stop beating our heads against the wall, and focus, instead, on just using RDFa, and to hell with HTML5 and microdata.

Bang! Bang!

I am very close to this. I had started my book on the issues I have with HTML5, and how I would change the specification, but after a while, a person gets tired of being shut out or shut down. I’m less interested in continuing to “bang my head against the wall”, as Jeni so eloquently put it.

But then I get an email this week, addressed to several folks, asking about the introduction of Microdata: so what does the W3C recommend, then? What should people use? Where should they focus their time?

Confusion. Confusion because the HTML5 specification is being drafted specifically to counter several initiatives that the W3C has been nurturing over the last decade: Microdata over RDF/RDFa; HTML over XHTML; Reverse DNS identifiers over namespaces, and URIs; the elimination of non-visual cues, not only for metadata, but also for the visually challenged. And respect. There is no respect for the W3C among many in the HTML Working Group. And I know I lose more respect for the organization the closer we get to HTML5 Last Call.

In fact, HTML Working Group is a bit of a misnomer. We don’t have HTML anymore, we have a Web OS.

We don’t have a simple HTML document, we have a document that contains the DOM, garbage collection, the Canvas object and a 2D API, a definition for web browser objects, interactive elements, drag and drop, cross-document communication, channel messaging, Microdata, several pre-defined vocabularies, probably more JavaScript than the ECMAScript standard, and before they were split off, client-side SQL, web worker threads, and storage. I’m sure there’s a partridge in a pear tree somewhere in there, but I still haven’t made it completely through the document. It’s probably in Section 10. I know there’s talk of extending to the document to include a 3D API, and who knows what else.

There’s a lot of stuff in HTML5. What isn’t in the HTML5 document is a clean, straightforward description of the HTML or XHTML syntax, and a clearly defined path for people to move to HTML5 from other specifications, as well as a way of being able to cleanly extend the specification—something that has been the cornerstone of both HTML and XHTML in the past. There’s no room for the syntax, in HTML5. It got shoved down by Microdata and the 2D API. There’s no room for the past, the old concepts of deprecated and obsolete have been replaced by such clear terms as “Conforming but obsolete”. And there’s certainly no room for future extensibility. After all, there’s always HTML6, and HTML7, …, HTMLN—all based on the same open, encompassing attitude that has guided HTML5 to where it is today.

If we don’t like what we see, we do have options. We can create our own HTML5 documents, and submit “spec text” for a vote. But what if it’s the whole document that needs work? That many of the pieces are good, but don’t belong in the parent document, or even in the HTML WG?

The DOM should be split out into its own section and should take all of the DOM/interactive, and browser object stuff with it. The document should be re-focused on HTML, without this mash-up of HTML syntax, scripting references, and API calls that exists now. The XHTML section should be fleshed out and separated out into its own section, too, if no other reason to perhaps reassure people that no, XHTML is not going away. We should also be reminded that XHTML is not just for browsers—in fact, the eBook industry is dependent on XHTML. And it doesn’t need Canvas, browser objects, or drag and drop.

Canvas should also be split out, to a completely separate group whose interest is graphics, not markup. As for Microdata, at this point, I don’t care if Microdata is continued or not, but it has no place in HTML5. If it’s good, split it out, and let it prove itself against RDFa, directly.

The document needs cleaning up. There are dangling and orphaned references to objects from Web Workers and Storage still littering the specification. It hops around between HTML syntax and API call, with nothing providing any clarity as to the rhyme or reason for such jumping about. Sure there’s a lot of good stuff in the document, but it needs organization, clean up, and a good healthy dose of fresh air, and even a fresher perspective.

Accessibility shouldn’t be added begrudgingly, woodenly, resentfully. It should be integrated into the HTML, not just pasted on in order to quiet folks because LC is coming up.

The concepts of deprecated and obsolete should be returned, to ensure a sense of continuity with HTML 4. And no, these did not originate with HTML. In fact, the use of deprecated and obsolete have been fairly common with many different technologies. I can guarantee nothing but the HTML5 document has a term like “conforming but obsolete”. I know, I searched high and low in Google for it.

And we need extensibility, and no, I don’t mean Microdata and reverse DNS identifiers. If extensibility was part of the system, folks who want to use RDFa could use RDFa, and not have to beg, hat in hand, to be allowed to sit at the HTML 5 table. This endless debate wouldn’t be happening, and everyone could win. Extensibility is good that way. Extensibility has brought us RDFa, SVG, MathML, and, in past specifications, will continue to bring whatever the future may bring.

whatever the future may bring…

Finding common ground? Walk a mile in each other’s moccasins? Meet mano a mano? Provide alternative specification text?

Bang! Bang!

Jeni’s a pretty smart lady.