- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2007 05:45:01 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Joshue O Connor <joshue.oconnor@ncbi.ie>
- Cc: foliot@wats.ca, "'Patrick H. Lauke'" <redux@splintered.co.uk>, public-html@w3.org
On Thu, 26 Jul 2007, Joshue O Connor wrote: > > > > > > # [07:52] <Hixie> the most annoying thing for me in public-html is > > > the way most people jump to a solution rather than determining the > > > problem > > Thats not true. People try their best to answer related threads and > contribute. If there is frustration about this then it should be made > more explicit that there is an expectation or preference for problem > determination rather than problem solution. That will totally confuse > the kids. I'm not sure exactly which part of what I said you think is not true, but for what it's worth I've already posted several times to this list being extremely explicit about the fact that what we need are descriptions of problems, not solutions: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jun/0003.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jun/0863.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jun/0946.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jun/0953.html To this day, though, people focus on solutions before fully describing the problems they are trying to solve. This isn't an effective language design strategy, and would IMHO be ultimately doomed to failure if we followed it. As editor, I have been ignoring, and intend to continue to ignore, solution proposals that are not first backed with separate and detailed descriptions of problems, with related research. > > > # # [07:55] <Lachy> like in the whole headers="" debate, I tried to > talk about how we could make tables accessible without needing headers, > and basically got accused of ignoring the needs of the accessibility > community > > > # # [07:55] <Hixie> yeah > > > # # [07:56] <Hixie> it's ridiculous > > This is slightly alarming as it seems to say that - we tried to ask you > what you thought but we didn't like the answer we got so we may not ask > again in the future. The headers="" debate resulted in significant progress in terms of getting solid research, but sadly the relevant wiki page: http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/IssueTableHeaders ...is still very much focussed on the solution rather than the problem. It includes a lot of research, which is really great, but, for example, the header of the page is "Headers Attribute" (as opposed to "associating header cells with data cells" or some such), the very first sentence in the issue description basically describes the problem as the lack of this attribute (the second sentence is better, though vague), the "Rationale" section is all about the headers="" attribute, etc. It would be much more helpful to work from a problem description. As of today, this page goes much more in this direction: http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/LongdescRetention ...despite the name of the page, the actual description of the problem is solution-agnostic. HTH, -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Thursday, 2 August 2007 05:45:23 UTC