- From: Ben 'Cerbera' Millard <cerbera@projectcerbera.com>
- Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2007 15:28:02 -0000
- To: "HTMLWG" <public-html@w3.org>, "Joe Clark" <joeclark@fawny.org>
>From Joe Clark's personal [weblog] on 23rd December, 2007: [[[ For a few elements and attributes, chiefly pertaining to tables, WHAT WG has grandly allowed that it might change its mind if and only if presented with overwhelming evidence .This is disingenuous, of course; they're wasting our time and they'll plow right ahead and remove from the spec whatever they never wanted there in the first place. ]]] What Joe is saying is exactly how I felt when I first came across WHATWG's work. It echos similar feedback from John [Foliot], Patrick [Lauke] and others. I'm one of many people who has attempted to gather and organise the "overwhelming evidence" Joe mentions. Joe's [previous] table collection for PDF/UA was my starting point. I've seen Laura Carlson, Joshue O'Connor, Steven Faulkner and several others provide work specifically to help accessibility in HTML5. Squeezing this in amongst their work of getting the web industry to take human rights relating to disability seriously is a big ask. Indeed, my [data tables] work has twice been dormant for months at a time due to professional commitments. My motivation for this research was partly to call WHATWG's bluff. A sort of "You want evidence? I'll give you evidence!" type situation. But what I found "in the wild" [surprised] me. The positive and constructive responses from WHATWG contributors surprised me. I started to think twice about WHATWG. Having interacted with a few of the WHATWG contributors over some months, I am convinced they are genuine. Their [approach] can seem quite alien to the world of accessibility enthusiasts (such as myself) and accessibility experts (such as the names I've mentioned) but it follows sound engineering principles. They started with a clean slate and are gradually filling in the gaps, accepting all the help they can get. If the community can't provide the necessary research, they'll do it [themselves]. Ian Hickson arranged [sponsorship] for myself, Joshue O'Conner and James Graham to attend the HTMLWG [meeting] in Boston this year. He lent me his laptop to do a brief presentation about my data tables research. People were noting things in IRC on my behalf. They helped me [pitch] for an unconference session on data tables. I was queued in amongst people pitching test suite organisation, spec status tracking and other engineering geekery. My pitch was barely 30 seconds and only a few people voted for it. Yet it carried. A time was picked where all the relevant people could make the session. This included James Graham. He's a long-time WHATWG [contributor] who made a [prototype] implementation of various table header association algorithms. Including one which is partly my [brainchild]. The session was [drafted] into the schedule, which was then [wikified]. Many people had helped. The meeting [took place] smoothly and collaboratively. Nobody had tried to block it or sabotage it. Later that day I ran into Henri Sivonen, creator of the HTML5 Conformance [Checker]. He enquired about the proceedings of the data tables meeting. I gave a quick summary and he casually agreed with it. He could have dismissed the findings because he wasn't there. He could have poked holes in my research. He could have ignored the whole thing. Are Ian and Maciej personally, or WHATWG collectively, trying to snuff out accessibility in HTML5 with disingenuous research requirements? If they are, then consistently facilitating such research, [reviewing] it and comitting to do it themselves if all else fails seems like an odd way to go about it. :-) [weblog] <http://blog.fawny.org/2007/12/23/janefonda/> [Foliot] <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2007Aug/0101.html> [Lauke] <http://www.accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=8083> [previous] <http://joeclark.org/dossiers/PDFUA/PDFUA-tables-1.html> [data tables] <http://sitesurgeon.co.uk/tables/> [surprised] <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Aug/1005.html> [approach] <http://annevankesteren.nl/2007/05/xtech-html5> [themselves] <http://brucelawson.co.uk/index.php/2007/html5-microformats-accessibility-testing/#comment-143047> [sponsorship] <http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/html-wg/20071005#l-302> [meeting] <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/nov07#tts> [pitch] <http://www.w3.org/2007/11/08-html-wg-minutes-other.html#item02> [draft] <http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2007696918&context=set-72157603149220446&size=l> [contributor] <http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2004-June/000512.html> [prototype] <http://james.html5.org/tables/table_inspector.html> [brainchild] <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Sep/0194.html> [took place] <http://projectcerbera.com/blog/2007/11#day09> [Checker] <http://validator.nu/> [reviewing] <http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20070905#l-273> P.S. I might turn this into a blog message because hyperlinks and plain text don't mix well. -- Ben 'Cerbera' Millard Collections of Interesting Data Tables <http://sitesurgeon.co.uk/tables/>
Received on Monday, 24 December 2007 15:28:29 UTC