BurningbirdTPAC is the W3C annual meeting where the various working group members gather in bloody battle to see who emerges victorious…and who then has to buy the beer.
I’ve just published my response—in my usual quietly thoughtful manner—to Opera employee notes from the meeting at RealTech.
The annual TPAC meeting is when standards people involved with W3C specifications get together to see if they can more easily hammer out issue resolutions face to face, rather than in endless email discussions. I suppose we can liken the event to finally meeting that really hot person you connected up with on Facebook—it’s a big of a crap shoot whether anything useful comes of the meeting.
Opera was kind enough to provide company rep impressions of the different meetings, though the W3C is the only entity that can provide official reports.
Among the items I was glad to see was the decision—finally—to publish WebSQL as a Working Group (WG) Note. What that means, boys and girls, is that this spec is dead, and we can finally drop it from our list of HTML5 technologies. Of course it never was HTML5, but that’s beside the point.
The comment on Web Sockets doesn’t reflect the recent findings of security problems and browsers disabling support for Web Sockets. We can all learn from Web Sockets, and how the race to be first isn’t the same as the need to be best.
There was a discussion about redefining previously defined presentational elements such as <s>, <small>, and others as semantic elements. I was glad to see that this discussion happened, because it makes little sense to talk about backwards compatibility, and then redefine a presentational element for semantic use. However, no conclusions was reached, which I guess means that the group broke up and went off to have a beer.
Sometimes I think “semantics” is used as a sort of all purpose lubricant to stuff whatever some folks want into HTML5.
I was not happy seeing the following statement, about accessibility and HTML5:
The a11y Task Force made a list of user requirements (about 100). During the meeting Frank Olivier from Microsoft went through the requirements with the HTML WG and we organized them. It turns out about 10 of them are applicable to the HTML5 specification and are not addressed yet. The HTML WG Co-Chairs as well as the W3C Interaction Domain Lead put their foot down with respect to accessibility potentially delaying the HTML5 Last Call. It was made clear that HTML5 is time driven, not feature driven. So if the work on these requirements is not complete by May next year, it will not happen.
One area of major failing at the W3C is how accessibility has been handled. The W3C initiates working groups that create specifications such as Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA), but even before this spec has a chance to be rolled out as a finished work, the W3C undercuts the work by demanding native implementation of most of the ARIA features in HTML5.
New semantic elements are added to HTML5 with the underlying reasoning being these are necessary for accessibility, but then the elements are not mapped to ARIA or to the accessibility API, leaving them basically worthless lumps of still not implemented technology—none of which can be styled, modified, customized, and few of which come anywhere close to what we have in existing JavaScript/ARIA/CSS implementations today.
The HTML5 Accessibility WG people seem to be spinning their wheels and dragging their feet, but the problem really is that the HTML5 editor keeps tweaking, adding, and removing things that impact on accessibility, forcing the group into a constant state of motion, just trying to stay in step with what’s going on.
The focus is on the “cool” stuff, like HTML5 video and captioning, at the expense of the more mundane, like alt, longdesc, table summary—yet the majority of web pages will never use any of the cool stuff, but will make use of the mundane. What makes this all even more fun is that because we don’t support that old thing deprecation in HTML5 working land, when something like longdesc is pulled, it’s just plain gone. End of story. It is now obsolete. There is no period where the attribute is deprecated, which not only would give folks a heads up about coming obsolescence of the attribute, but also provide an alternative for the attribute’s functionality.
However, seamless transitions are old fashioned—abrupt changes and disconnects are so much more hip.
The HTML5 co-chairs, rather than ensuring all voices are heard equally, have somehow managed to drive all useful discussion out of the HTML5 WG email list to bug reports, which has the advantage of being out of sight, out of mind. They’ve confused the Last Call commenting with bug reporting, encouraged outsiders to comment, but only if they become insiders for the group. They created a working group procedure that ties the working group up in procedures so that procedures are not discussed in the working group email list—which has now become an archive for bug reports, including some really cute ones that come in from the commenting form in the WhatWG HTML5 document, typically consisting of words like, This damn thing has broken my browser….FIX IT!!!!
So to participate in Last Call commenting you kind of have to become some kind of insider, though the whole purpose of Last Call commenting was to get comments from those outside the group…but hey, the majority of insiders in the HTML5 are outsiders, anyway, because the HTML5 WG co-chairs more or less just gives the HTML5 editor whatever he wants because, as we’ve come to find out, the HTML5 specification is being held hostage by a handful of browser vendors who really don’t give a damn what we need or want, because they’re too busy outdoing each other with cool stuff. Like Web Sockets.
Personally, I can’t wait for the official W3C reports on TPAC. Then I can really tell you what I think.
As I detail in RealTech, not only am I upgrading to Drupal 7, I’m also moving to a new host. I figured it was time to move to a server where I have more control over the environment.
I’m also doing other work, which may leave my site in a tangled mess at times. If you don’t see any web pages, or don’t get an immediate email reply, it’s just me deep in the inner workings of the Burningbird Monster, trying to determine what happens when I pull this, push that.
Drupal 7 is right around the corner, and my efforts to see how it would work on my existing server made me decide it is time to move to another hosting company. I need more control over my own space, and what is, or is not, installed. After discussions with the inestimable Laura Scott (@lauras), my go-to person for anything Drupal, I’ve decided on a Linode VPS account.
Linode has attracted a good Drupal community, which is important to me. In addition, it provides an extremely easy to use interface, which makes it quite simple to manage the space. I also like the fact that the company provides a good selection of documentation on how to do things geared to its own environment.
Since I’m making a major Drupal upgrade and moving to a new server, now is the time to look seriously at how my web sites are configured and designed, and make changes. I think this is one of the advantages to major releases—they provide a time to stop, think, and decide if you want to keep what you, or if now is the time to make all those other little changes you’ve been thinking about.
Since I’ve designed my own Drupal themes, I need to upgrade them to Drupal 7, as well as incorporate new HTML5/RDFa features. I may even do a re-design, not sure yet. I don’t like web site designing, so I may just grab one of the existing Drupal themes, and tweak it.
Several of my sites haven’t been updated in a donkey’s age, so I need to figure out if I’m going to continue writing at the sites. I probably will keep most, if not all, but I may do some major re-organizing.
I’ve not been taking many photos this year, as some of you have noticed. I need to re-design my photo pages to incorporate Drupal 7 changes and also my changed photography habits.
I’ve become much more interested in eBooks and the ePub format this last year. I was looking at creating an ePub module for Drupal, but someone already started this effort(Drupal ePub Module). However, there’s been little work on the module, and I’m thinking that an extension to the Print Module is a better approach. Or perhaps the best thing to do is just create an ePub friendly XHTML theme, and do a wget or curl on a book’s pages and use one of the many existing ePub publishing tools to create an ePub eBook. It’s better to be a smart developer than a clever one, and smart developers use what exists. Plus the same pages can be used to create a Kindle book, a Nook, and others.
I have been thinking of incorporating Disqus into some of my web sites. I’ve used this service at other sites, and I like how it works. Commenters can edit their comments, track their discussions across many sites, and they don’t have to provide a username and password for each web site (*cough* Gawker) to expose to hackers. Plus, if I turn comments off, the people still have access to their own writing. And Drupal has a module for Disqus, though I’ve not been able to get it to work with my theme (another reason to re-design my pages).
One thing I really like about Drupal 7 is if you don’t like the new administration interface, you can turn off all the new bits. You can turn off the overlay (don’t like), the page-top toolbar (still considering), and the new Dashboard (a keeper). I also like the fact that all the modules I use now are either incorporated directly into Drupal 7, or the developers have guaranteed a first day Drupal 7 release. Most of the modules have also committed to accessibility—that’s something you don’t often see with content management systems. Or W3C specifications.
Earlier, I found a PR release from the AVMA (American Veterinarian Medical Association) undermining Missouri’s Proposition B in favor of its “model bill”. In an associated video, the AVMA’s CEO, Dr. DeHaven, states that Proposition B only sets limits on the number of dogs that can be kept, when in actuality, Proposition B does more (DeHaven’s video)—much more than the AVMA model bill, which relies almost completely on a commercial dog breeder honor system (and large scale commercial dog breeders are not necessarily known for their honor).
Afterward, I received an email related to a bug I’m following in the HTML5 working group. In response to detailed, thoughtful request for a way to provide alternative text for a video poster, the HTML5 editor, Ian Hickson, declined, writing as rationale:
The request here is just cargo-cult accessibility and would not
actually improve the life of any users, while costing authors in wasted time
and effort.
I reacted the same to both: that’s just not right.
You would think that humane treatment of dogs and ensuring accessibility for folks would be no-brainers, equivalent to being “agin sin”. You would think so…and you would be wrong.
Whatever sense of empathy and compassion we had, once upon a time, seems to have been left in a long ago forgotten consciousness. Today, what rules is the bottom line, and if that bottom line must run over the bodies of puppies and disabled, equally, run it must because there’s a new sense of pragmatic necessity that rules in the land.
Those who cannot see do not really need to know what the poster to a video is all about, because authors can’t really be bothered to provide the information. It’s not pragmatic to even consider the option. As Hickson stated earlier in the discussion of the bug:
I’m confused. Why would you (a blind user) want to know what the poster frame
is? How does it affect you?
How does it affect you‽
The welfare of dogs is important, yes, but not at the cost of the rights of the breeder. Weighing the needs of the dogs over the wants of the breeder is not pragmatic. The AVMA invited Wes Jamison, a communications professor from Florida, to speak about the role of veterinarians in today’s society. What he said explains much about the AVMA position:
Dr. Jamison … indicated that the veterinary profession, by emphasizing the importance of the human-animal bond, enables consumer hypocrisy, which is exploited by animal protection organizations. He argued that the AVMA should abandon advocating for the human-animal bond in favor of fighting for the right of animal owners to use animals as they choose, whether that entails companionship, food, or labor.
The human-animal bond is hypocrisy‽
Pragmatic hell, that’s just not right.