Discussion on:

HTML 5 Editor Ian Hickson discusses features, pain points, adoption rate, and more

HTML 5 is a long way off from being a spec, but that doesn't mean that some of its features are not being implemented yet. Are you curious about HTML 5? Is there anything about it that you would like to know more about?

J.Ja

Is Mr Hickson's ad-hominem against accessibility experts really necessary? Surely such bile and rhetoric only serves to further demonstrate that Hickson is not fit to lead the HTML 5 Working Group, or serve as editor.

The people he scorns with the phrase "so-called accessibility experts" have enriched the knowledge and wisdom of building accessible websites.

As I pointed out in AbilityNet's recent Accessibility 2.0 conference (on the closing panel); the hard work and due dilligence by people like Steve Faulkner, Gez Lemon, Joshue O'Connor, Patrick Lauke have ensured that the term Accessible Ajax isn't a laughable oxymoron, but an actual vital collection of insights and best practice.

This purposefully dismissive soundbite from Ian Hickson is unwarranted, unprofessional and unbecoming of a W3C Working Group Editor. This is not in keeping with ensuring that the World Wide Web can be accessible to people with disabilities. And it certainly doesn't play a constructive part in solving an issue that needs to be solved properly.


Mike Davies.

I'm sorry but I'm not going to pander to people who make claims
without backing them up. There are plenty of people who work in
the accessibility community who are part of the HTML5 effort who
have done wonderful great work providing us with usability studies
(e.g. Joshue O'Connor), making long and detailed studies (e.g. Ben
Millard), and so on.

People don't get a free pass just because they come from the
accessibility community.

In case it wasn't clear, though, I'm certainly not referring to everyone
in that community with my comment in the interview.

I agree, you can't generalize in either direction.

"ad-hominem"? "bile"?
Mike, do you have high blood pressure and hypertension? If he had named names and made a vicious personal remark, that would have been "ad hominem." His comments were likewise free of bile. I'm sure you have good reason for your great sensitivity, but hey - chill out.

... and I'll give you 7 different opinions on
any given subject.
Most of the most strident arguments will be
from the "visual disabilities" community.
While this is valid, it is also exclusive to
that community and to the detriment of people
with other disabilities.
Just look at the current federal case in
Canada.
"http://www.bakerlaw.ca/Media%20Release%20-
%20Blind%20MBA%20challenges%20federal%20gover
nment%20over%20inaccessible%20jobs%20websites
.pdf" (Yep, PDF)
Her own web site, which offers "accessibility
consulting" fails in so many ways, except of
course if you're blind and use a screen
reader.
Her lawyer(s) site is a bit better http://www.bakerlaw.ca/, code validation
could help.
There are very few "accessibility experts"
who view the topic with a holistic, non-
biased, standard-based frame of reference.
We are left with different "camps" which
segment and fragment the accessibility
community into disparate spheres of
influence.
What's the answer? I don't know.
The only thing I can think of is "empathy".
Put yourself in the other person's shoes,
walk a mile and them come talk to me.

Sorry, I forgot to include her website.
It's at "http://www.sterlingcreations.ca/"
Images for text? C'mon!
CSS is your friend.

I have two friends that use audible browsers and one that is colour blind. (Ok, he's from Idaho, I guess he's color blind.) I do something to the site, I have them give a few test pages a go. Not only do I listen to what doesn't work, I listen for what gets in the way.

I keep my pages simple. I've always tried to stay away from using tight formatting just because it takes away from users' choice.

I went into this in browser statistics. For me it's about reaching the most people with what they want. I'll put off a few on the way, but I doubt for long.

I did get a kick out of him saying that some 'wants' are to work around bugs.

I do hope the next standard will split the functions of the alt tag. I like to fill it in for accessibility, but most of that text does not need to show while a person with sight holds the mouse pointer over. I've wanted to put complete descriptions of images in the alt tags, but they'd just cover the entire picture if a person put the mouse over the picture. I've often wanted a separate 'keycap' attribute, or the like.

It would be nice to have a multi-column element so I don't have to carefully divide lists into three separate divs.

Also, predictable non-comformance would be absolutely wonderful! I'd love to see that now.

...to your images to preclude the covering of
the image by the "alt" rendering in I.E.
BTW "alt=" text doesn't show on hover in
standards compliant browsers. To get that
effect, you also have to use the "title'
attribute.

Where was that defined?

Specified in the HTML Spec, Part 7 section 7.4.3. (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.4.3)
The display of the "alt" attribute in a similar fashion is an I.E. behaviour and other standards-compliant browsers don't display "alt" as a "tool-tip".
That's why I use both. If I need a complete description of a complex image, I include a "longdesc" (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/objects.html#adef-longdesc-IMG"

It is important to note that the behavior of providing a tool tip is *not* defined by the spec. In fact, most of the behavior we see in Web browsers is not explicitly defined by the spec. So beware when counting on a common "side effect" of a particular tag or attribute, since it can change in the future.

J.Ja

You're right. I probably should have pointed that out instead of just linking to the spec. Everybody love to read specs, don't they?
The cautionary not to those who read this stuff is: "Values of the title attribute may be rendered by user agents in a variety of ways." It then goes on to point out "visual browsers frequently display the title as a "tool tip"".
Thanks for reminding me to be more clear.

and side effects? LOL

I was just using HTML 5 as an example of a convergence effort around the web. Seeing Ian's prediction of the long road (4 more years! Sounds familiar) ahead, I must adjust my optimism around this.

Nice interview packed with goodies. Thanks Justin.

I am now curious to know what is going on with b and i.
I suppose I'll go have a look-see.

NT

?

I hesitated to see where the conversation was going.

I really try to stay out of the accessibility arguement because I see no reason for a site that is built for people to LOOK AT to go all out for accessibility.

I've gotten myself into many an arguement over it an just hit the back button as soon as I saw the word!

I did however totally enjoy the the original article/interview. I am anxious to see how the 5 standards will make browser compatibility a lesser problem than it is now.

I admit, I am guilty of using the alt tag to give sited visitors more info than I could fit elswhere while keeping navigation (in particular) neet and tidy. It's the only reason to still use buttons for navigation IMHO, even if they look more like text than buttons. Ooops another accessibility issue!

I better get out of here now before I am bombarded by the pros for not making every site I've ever worked on totally accessible for everyone!

There was nothing going on here, last I posted. Just checked in to see the "attack on accessibility", which I do not believe was intended. Someone misunderstood, or has a bug in his ear.

I just figured more folks would have something to say about HTML 5 in general.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I too fall into a "middle ground". My goal on the topic is to get the spec to *allow* for (with proper hooks) HTML authors to make their documents as accessible as possible, not just to vision impaired users, but to *all* disabled users (99% of the "Accessibility Arguement" centers around vision-impaired users). At the same time, I feel that any attempts to mandate or force HTML authors to make their documents accessible is not likely to result in more than a few percent of documents being changed. Then again, that's still millions of documents. One idea that was floated that I liked a lot, was to create a 3rd category of HTML validation, insteasd of pass/fail... add "inaccessible". So this way something would be valid, but indicate that it doesn't have any accessibility on it. That would go a long way to raising awareness amongst HTML authors, I think.

J.Ja

A middle ground would be an ideal resolution.
This then raises the question of governance at the W3C level.
How do we reconcile the various and sometimes seemingly contradictory objectives of the W3C Working Groups?
HTML 5, WCAG, ARIA, WHATWG, UAAG, ATAG, ...
From a Risk Analysis point of view, each group is a potential point of failure in achieving the foundational principles of the WWW? I won't add the Tim Berners Lee reference, we've all see that one enough.

Do you think it can be reconciled?
There are so many diversities, so many variables to expect to ever reach any kind of balance.
That does not say we should not strive for it.
It would be the same as you or I striving for perfection, you have to reach but you also have to understand you will never get there.
Taking that back to the original HTML 5 interview - the goal is to come up with a spec that would achieve balance for all. However, no matter how hard we try that will never be achieved so does it make sense to spend 10 + years trying? Wouldn't it make better sense to spend that time and energy on swaying those who create browsers to be less compliant?

Don't get me wrong, I am all for HTML 5 and authoring compliance and accessibility within reason. I am tossing up a question that will hopefully draw out some interesting thoughts.

@dixiedi:
I'm not familiar with the inner working of the W3C or the processes involved.
I can say, from the point of an outside observer, it seems very disjointed.
It appears that there is little collaboration between the various WGs.
One group is only focused on "this", while another group is only focused on "that", and yet another group is only focused on "the other."
Throwing things out to the wild for comment without gaining acceptance from the other disciplines seems like inviting controversy.
Consultation with the other WGs must be strictly regulated as in "You have until (YYYY:MM:DD) to respond or it will be presumed you agree." Internal debate is then very focused.

I am currently part of a WG which is involved in developing corporate standards. The group is made up of a diverse representation of perspectives; policy, governance, programming, accessibility, standards compliance, and evaluation.
We meet once a week and try to move very quickly. We have agreed to work in a "consensus" model. Positions are taken, discussed and voted on. Every two weeks, or month, depending on progress, our is workcirculated to two other WGs for comment.

A lot of our efforts are based on existing open standards and we all have a strong respect for each others opinion and point of view.
I believe it is our diversity and our respect for that diversity which contributes to our current progress.
We also have a strong, diplomatic (mostly) coordinator who is quite good at encouraging consensus.

I look forward to our WG sessions as a refreshing escape from my daily "battles."

WW.

All "governing bodies" appear disjointed, don't they? I couldn't help it a major election year and all. LOL

I can see, simply because I can not see, how it works to get anything accomplished. The way I understand it, just about anyone can add their two cents worth, I would hope that all these pennies tossed in are at least considered; this alone would add years to any progress.

There has to be groups of groups overseeing groups and meeting to eventually bring it all together. It could be very confusing but I am guessing. My wording, which has dropped to the level of a 5th grader at best proves I have little in the way of understanding the inner workings. I can't even hold an intellegent conversation.

I could not agree more. The W3C, from what I have seen, is a great example of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing. We have the WCAG doing their stuff with no real feedback loop to HTML 5, for example.

You know what the problem is? UNIX. Huh? Let me explain.

I think most of the people in this discussion are familiar with the UNIX model of development. You know how it is... anyone writing an SMTP MTA needs to emulate sendmail's command line behavior because that's the assumed behavior, their output needs to look like sendmail's, etc. In otherwords, the entire I/O model of any SMTP MTA needs to look *precisely* like sendmail (even if it optionally uses its own stuff), otherwise, anything relying upon sendmail fails.

The W3C works like this. CSS development is 100% divorced from HTML, because even thought not a *single spec uses CSS other than HTML* (that I am aware of), they made it modular. "Just in case." What a load of nonsense. No one is going to hook CSS to something that isn't HTML, and no one is going to hook HTML to a styling system that is not CSS. Likewise, no one is going to hook a client-side language to the HTML DOM that is not JavaScript. And so on and so on. But, to satiate the "elegance nerds" out there, the development is completly split into a zillion uncoordianted project. Why in the WORLD would ARIA be developed separately from HTML? Is there a non-HTML use for ARIA that I am not aware of?

Until the W3C drops this senseless idea of total separation of the spec development, we'll keep seeing this mess. WCAG should have been a subcomitte of HTML, same for ARIA, same for CSS. But W3C doesn't want to do it, so we'll keep having problems.

J.Ja

Very few people come into the accessibility field without bringing some personal baggage.

This baggage often gets dumped upon innocent developers/designers (D/D). Nobody goes out of their way to intentionally exclude anybody.
Heck, we all want to attract and keep the most customers for our clients. D/D's just can't know everything all at once.

Many accessibility experts (whether self-proclaimed or experiential and community declared) can come off as being the equivalent of rabid activists. They don't mean to, really. It seems to me that they forget that when a D/D asks a question, or makes a simple mistake, that it may be the first time that D/D has been confronted with that situation. They (We) sometimes fly-off-the-handle (guilty) but please understand this is the "n-th" time we've seen the same issue. Our tolerance level is occasionally a little low.
You should see us when we are debating with someone that we KNOW should know better, we're downright nasty!

Rabid is just a bit light on the diagnosis, don't you think? I would have gone for vampiric. They don't just want to tear you a new ahole, they want to bleed you dry afterward! LOL But I do understand, just hate trying to repeatedly explain my rationale for why not all sites need to be accessible to all. It's just not financially feasable.

I'm glad you are qualifying that as "financially feasible" rather than impossible.
Otherwise I'd have to sharpen my fangs and break out my "ACME ahole-o-matic". (_8(|)
I stop before blood, I hate the sight of blood.
I try to understate my qualifiers of my contemporaries when speaking publicly.

I look at the recent debate about the requirement, or not, for the "alt" attribute in HTML 5 where one of the exemplars was Flickr's lack of capacity to accommodate the attribute.
Would it really be so hard to add the option for the user to provide content?
I'm not saying retroactively, that would be onerous.
As a go forward approach, it would actually be a feasible option. That way, it is the submitter who takes responsibiity, not the site owners.

/Withdraws fang and packs away gear/

I've noticed the same thing too. I have a hunch that many of the people in accessibility have a very personal reason for being there, whether it be a disabled family member or friend, or even that they themselves are disabled. As a result, I have often seen something in the group that might not lead to complete accessibility be treated as an assault on an individual, with some messy results. To me, the irony is that probably 99% of the effort I have seen on "accessibility" is very narrow minded: it only cares about *vision* impaired users. It was not until last week when I brought it up, that I saw any kind of serious discussion around *hearing* impaired users. And I am interested to see how people respond when the topic of *mobility* impaired users comes up. With all of the AJAX-ification that's occuring, without something like a strong enforcement of ARIA, there is no way that a quadrapelgic could really use the HTML documents that HTML 5 really enables. It is important for all of us to remember that "accessibility" covers an enormous range of disabilities and circumstances!

J.Ja

...in a different area though.

They were so busy putting in switch-back ramps (that I call fish ladders), that they didn't put in stairs in some obvious places. I have a foot disability that is invisible most of the time. It means that I'd like to walk shorter distance rather than longer ones, even if it includes a few steps. Tesco's dead on for the wheel chairs (if they can get around the trolleys abandonded on the rampway) but not for people with foot disabilities, that still actually use their feet.

There are many, many accessibility misunderstandings. This happens on all sides of the issue. People with disabilities and those who support them, know what affects them.
Then there are the misunderstanding of how people with disabilities actually use computers. This is where it can get weird, wild and wonderful (all at the same time!).
To play off the "quadrapelgic" reference, it could depend on whether we are talking about a high-level-quad with extermely limited/no upper body mobility or or someone who has gross motor function but may lack the dexterity to effectively use a mouse. Which ever one we are talking about, I can almost guarantee there is a why to interface with almost any application. This could be as simple as assistive mouse software or as complex as an eye gaze system and clicking by blinking.
I've supported many people with many disabilities and some with multiple disabilities (including myself).

P.S. note to dixiedi@: I caught a "message limit" on the thread discussing the W3C, I can't answer you there. Sorry It was getting good.

Reply to the post that is one level up, or reply to the very first post or article, which will give you more branching room.

Once upon a time, it was nice to make a web page as a user and I think that the initial ease of use drew in lot's of people and probably made the web what it is today.

I however see the seeds of the death of the average user participation. It seems that in building all the trick functionality like CSS and now the additions of HTML 5 "the regular guy" is being lost. A tier of simple application should always be part of the web to provide a door way for users.

A shame really, since many in the industry gained access as a user.

I agree as well. In fact, this was part of my motivation for joining the group in the first place, looking out for average HTML authors. There are a number of other people in the group doing the same. Indeed, everyone represents a special interest of one sort or another, mine just happens to be "HTML authors".

J.Ja

As much time over the past 10 years as I have spent helping the casual html author I have come to the conclusion that it does not matter what the specs are. They are going to do what they want, the way they want and as long as it looks good to them,in their own browser, they don't care.
If they are building a personal business site and they do not take the time to learn the specs then it is their business that will fail. If it is truly a personal site, it just doesn't matter because only 1 in a million internet surfers will see it anyway.
But I still help them; trying to teach them to at least work in 2 browsers (IE and Foxfire), at 800X600, to keep it simple, to keep the color balanced and to load sometime in this century on a dial up.
Anything beyond that is more headache than I can handle!
Causal html authors, on average, don't have enogh education, however obtained, to take it any further than that and most (IMHO with 10 years experience teaching casual authors) do not care.

It is not the spec, the law, or the right thing to do. It's the "craft" of developing/designing for the web.
A true Craftsman knows, understands, and balances all of the variables in their domain.

The web is still the "wild west" of Craftsmanship". We need to change that underlying perception.
We need to advance the capabilities of the "WYSIWYG" tools and services beyond the "LEET" cloud-space.

Any poor college student can tell you how to make a bookcase out of a couple planks and a few milk crates.

It takes a few skills and some knowledge to make something your kids would be proud to say "My Dad made that".

Frontpage design and the true "craft" of designing for the web leaves a huge gap in the knowledge factor.
Browsers which are too forgiving of poor mark-up only exacerbate the problem.

Web design, outside of "Facebook" or "Blogger", is a true craft. If you go there, "Here there be dragons".
Focus on your craft, not what your IDE tells you it can do.

Demand better of your tools and services. They may just listen.

I agree completely about casual HTML authors. That's why I'm a bug proponent of trying to make the HTML spec something that the people writing authoring tools can an will follow. Authoring tools are more than just desktop Web editors (Dreamweaver, Expression Web, etc.), too! "Authoring tools" includes Microsoft Word and Publisher, it include the various Web-based HTML editing widgets for blogs and CMS's and so on. That's where some of the WORST HTML comes from, BTW. It was not until the last year or so, for example, that the extremely popular FCKEditor stopped using the "obsolete" (since 1999!) font tag, due to technical reasons! In my ideal world, HTML either gets generated by a tool/application that makes good HTML, or it gets hand crafted by someone knowing what they are doing. I would *love* to eliminate "casual HTML authors" as a group of users, but I know that it is an impossible task, especially since they are the source of much of the great information and content on the Web, even if their HTML is scary.

J.Ja

I've often told people to think of HTML as being like teachers that would put proofing marks on our papers back in school. That was quite a mark up language, figuring out all the odd little marks for caps, underlines, italics, spelling, etc.

I agree, Justin, that a lot of the web comes from casual authors. They often don't need a lot. Give them the little they need, and we shouldn't have to worry about them abusing the other stuff that should not be there in the first place for text documents.

... a subset of HTML get made that has just what a casual author would need, to help them not get as confused.

J.Ja

I've been involved with the internet since it was ARPAnet and I was also one of the original SGML template designers. Do I care about HTML5? No. Why should I? Is no one paying attention to the I.T. world? What makes you think anyone will be using HTML in the next 5 years?? Sheesh, wise up ppl!

When I hear that HTML5 adoption will be the demise of Silverlight and Flash, what does that mean? And why is that the case? Why is Silverlight retreating to the mobility world (why would it be technologically more sustainable in the mobile paradigm vs. any other platform such as a desktop PC)? Why is Apple so adversarial towards Silverlight and Flash (technologically speaking)?