Re: web standards project article

* Molly E. Holzschlag wrote:
>Quite frankly, Bjoern, it's precisely that kind of elitism that turns off
>the rest of the world to standards.  It's sad, and it's irresponsible.

No, sorry Molly, but what turns people off is hearing a lot of different
things on the same matters from different people. If you say "semantic
markup is an implied goal, not even a measure of compliance" and I say
the opposite people get confused and disappointed as they perceive web
standards to be too difficult to understand and get lost lacking proper
guidance as they would no longer know whom they should listen to.

>1.  How to serve XHTML versus HTML remains an extremely confusing issue for
>the majority of people, and with no practical "this is how to" solution that
>seems to make sense to the majority of practitioners.

Sorry Molly, but complaining about this here is unhelpful. If you think
these matters are not well-documented or unsolved, you should provide
your constructive criticism to the responsible Working Group, which is
the W3C HTML Working Group, which you can contact through the mailing
list www-html-editor@w3.org as noted in most of their publications.

>2.  That people want accessible terminology.  The distinction between a Note
>and a Recommendation (which I do understand by the by) is not something THE
>MAJORITY OF PRACTITIONERS CARE ABOUT.  They want a practical solution, not a
>mishmash of unclear and conflicting documentation - and they deserve it.
>Sadly, this is a failing of the W3C's terminology and process and is largely
>understood by people who work in that environment - but not those of us who
>work outside of it. 

This is not the case Molly, the W3C Process gives a lot of rights to any
reviewer of its Technical Reports, it requires that any issue raised on
Working Drafts, etc. is formally addressed by the Working Group and that
these Working Groups attempt to satisfy the reviewer, so anyone thinking
that a particular document is unclear or in conflict with other
documentation should request that the documentation is clarified. Novice
authors are not the primary audience of Technical Reports but that is no
excuse for poor specifications! So if you think you can help making some
of these documents more accessible to practioners please do, your help
will be much appreciated.

>3.  That people are extremely interested in finding a way to balance the
>practice with the science (semantic markup, etc).  The science is becoming
>increasingly inaccessible to the majority of the practitioning audience who
>do not have the patience to read through specs, much less understand them
>when they get there.

While I do not think this is really this case, inaccessibility of the
relevant technical documentation is indeed a problem. Web standards need
to be universally and consistently understood by all people involved, it
would be foolish to think incomprehensible Web standards can succeed, so
this really requires attention if it is getting even worse.

The proper solution here is of course to do everything we can to bring
these Web standards in sync with the needs of all the people involved.
This can of course only work if these people get involved with the Web
standards since they know their needs and how to satisfy them best. So
what I think people are really interested in here is less noticable
differences between practice and science rather than a balance between
them.

Again, if you think you can contribute something to that, please do,
and do not hestitate to ask me for any help I can provide!

Thanks very much Molly!

Received on Friday, 29 October 2004 16:11:31 UTC