- From: Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 01:30:39 -0500
- To: public-html WG <public-html@w3.org>
- Message-Id: <69B023FF-74DE-40AA-BCEA-5DAD283AA630@robburns.com>
I'm trying a new quoting approach for accessibility reasons (feedback is welcome). I'm using two single lines starting: > Quoting <name> <email> >> Unquoting <name> <email> to indicate the start of quoted text and the end of the quoted text respectively. The end quote is always indicated with a quote of a quote (double >> in plain text). The start quote is just a single quote (>). This makes it harder to visually scan for new text which is not offset on every line, but it may make it easier for screen reader users to read. (It sure would be nice if we had actual semantic HTML support in the email world). With that said, here are my comments: > Quoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: It's important to keep in mind that when people disagree, there are often different perceptions on different sides of the argument, especially in media like email and IRC that don't convey emotional cues very well. What you see as process abuse, others may see as vigorous discussion that ultimately leads to a better spec. Similarly, sometimes individuals may perceive a conversation as a series of unwarranted personal attacks on them, where others may see that individuals remarks as trolling or needlessly disruptive. >> Unquoting Maciej Stachowiak > Quoting John Foliot <foliot@wats.ca> Maciej, I agree that often the emotional and visual cues of the written word are lacking, however, please do refer to Tina's earlier response [http://tinyurl.com/293sry]: there can be no mistaking the intent of the comments made about her - there is no ambiguity in those written words. >> Unquoting John Foliot > Quoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: I agree that people said some not-very-nice things about Tina, but this was during an earlier phase of the working group when it seemed to me there was more hostility and argumentation in general. So I would not necessarily assume things are the same today. I will also note that Tina's emails to the group were seen by some as disruptive at the time. >> Unquoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: I think that's a major part of the problem Dissent or merely disagreement is often seen as disruptive by some members of the WG. While, on the other hand, genuine disruption is seen as "manly" or "showing technical prowess" or whatever phrase is used to justify the disruption. It may simply be borne of a defensiveness that "outsiders" may not appreciate the work of the WhatWG (I've tried to calm that fear in the past). However, his disruptive attitude has been leveled against others whether they are affiliated with the W3C or simply invited guests here to the WG. Disagreement is not disruptive. However, rudely dismissing disagreement or opposing viewpoints is disruptive. It squelches dissent. > Quoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: While we still have some heated discussions in the group, I think we are generally in a more peaceful era, and I see a lot of productive work taking place. But still, it's best for all of us to try to be kind and courteous as much as we can, and also to understand that there will be lapses. >> Unquoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: I think the peace you're talking about has been won through chasing away many dissenters. We have achieved relative peace by chasing away those who would disagree with the general thrust of the current draft. > Quoting John Foliot <foliot@wats.ca> Some might think they are the extreme, or taken out of context, but if you care to follow the full thread of this conversation, there are others who have felt the same "chilling effect" [Sam Ruby @ IBM -http://tinyurl.com/28ae6u]: the superior tone and argumentative attitude that brow-beats dissenters on list, and as witnessed by Tina's archived comments, ridicules them off list. >> Unquoting John Foliot <foliot@wats.ca> > Quoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: Now I'm going to contradict myself a little. It's generally good to be nice, but it's also good to be able to forcefully disagree if you don't accept someone else's argument. Too much argumentativeness can have a chilling effect, yes. But chasing away or banning people who seem too argumentative can create another kind of chilling effect. People become afraid to point out problems in other people's proposals for fear of being seen as one of the mean people. Ultimately, being too afraid to criticize will result in a lower quality spec. The difficult thing here is to provide the appropriate balance. >> Unquoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: The issue being raised here is not necessarily about "being nice" or "forcefully disagreeing". Rather, it's about how one should forcefully disagree or conduct oneself in a WG that should be about building consensus: and not building consensus by chasing away dissent. We can all forcefully disagree with one another without dismissing others viewpoints. To use the idea of a use-case in good faith, we need to understand how opposing viewpoints might be trying to solve a particular use-case: one perhaps already addressed in the draft. We also need to understand that we are dealing with a very rough draft: one that is not always clear about addressing use-cases. So if someone proposes an enhancement for HTML or a change to the draft, that person may not understand the draft or the current state of HTML5. It's equally likely that even for someone that does fully understand the HTML5 draft, they may not have considered all possible use-cases or problem statements surrounding the state of HTML and therefore may easily misunderstand a new proposal. > Quoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: As long as we stick to criticizing the idea, not the person, I think we're more or less ok. >> Unquoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: No, I don't think that is OK. It's not enough to simply avoid ad hominem attacks (though those should be avoided certainly). It's also important to understand opposing viewpoints. No one joins this WG because they want to bring down the web (at least I hope they know there's other more effective ways to do that). They devote their time to this WG in order to improve the situation on the web for author's and user's alike. So by all means criticize ideas, but criticize ideas in constructive ways. Criticize other's ideas without the attitude that has often gone along with those criticisms. If someone presents an idea you think is crazy or misguided or even stupid expect that you are probably misunderstanding something about that idea, because I doubt there are very many crazy misguided or stupid people participating in this WG. > Quoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: I think this may be the heart of the misunderstanding, and I think the feelings of disagreement may be partly more about style than substance. When I read the transcript, I saw in it some sentiments that I can relate to myself. First, I think most of us here, even those who do not see themselves primarily as "accessibility advocates", would agree that it's important to support accessibility. No one has disputed that part of the design principles. However, I do think there are some disagreements on how to best achieve good accessibility for the web. Here's the major divide I see, and these are somewhat extreme statements of the two positions: [Position A]: Accessibility is important. Therefore we should have a lot of HTML features that are there specifically to aid accessibility for some classes of users. Authors should be required to add as much accessibility stuff as possible to their markup. >> Unquoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: This, so-called, extreme statement of the position is just the sort of straw man that has been used to silence dissent on this list. For example when the issue of equivalent alternate fallback was raised, you brought up your own personal flickr account and suggested it would not be right (fair or just or whatever) to require you to include a @longdesc on photos for your friends and family. However, that was not the topic anyone was discussing. We didn't even know about your flickr account. We were discussing: including features in HTML5 that had already been included in HTML4: features that <em>allow</em> authors to add fallback content to images (not require authors). In this way various accessibility advocates have been repeatedly badgered (into silence?) with straw man arguments like this. > Quoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: [Position B]: Many authors won't think that much about accessibility. So the best accessibility enhancements are those that work on top of features that also have some benefit in mainstream browsers with no added AT. In the course of making the right markup for general use, accessibility comes along for the ride, and that's basically all we need. >> Unquoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: Perhaps this is an equally extreme straw man statement of position B, however it does seem more in line with what I've been reading on this list. That is, we find many suggesting that accessibility should mostly be just a celebration of happy coincidences where certain aspects of HTML and Unicode text and the human senses just happen to be able to provide a way for disadvantaged users to consume — from time to time — minor tidbits of content that non-disadvantaged users easily consume completely. Perhaps it is because it is stated in an extreme way, but this looks to me exactly like a statement that HTML should not have any accessibility facilities. Often times (like in the case of @headers) the attempt to purge accessibility features from HTML has even extended to features of HTML that are not even particularly about accessibility but instead about explicitly expressing semantics within complex documents (just because it may have some accessibility implications) This, to me, attacks the heart of what HTML is about. In the archives there are several places where Maciej suggested others might be better off working on XHTML2 than HTML5. However, for those who don't want to provide authors with an ability to explicitly express semantics in their HTML documents, I'm often left wondering why they're not just working on bringing better RTF support to existing browsers and forgetting about HTML entirely. > Quoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: Notice that there is no debate here about whether accessibility is important. The disagreement is solely over the best way to address it. >> Unquoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: Well from your statement of the extremes (position A and position B), it does indeed look like there's a disagreement over the importance of accessibility. Your statement of position B was basically that HTML should not include facilities if they would only be useful for a disadvantaged web user. Laclan has made similar arguments: insisting that documents should only include elaborations of non-text media if those elaborations would be useful to non-disadvantaged users (in other words those who can already consume the non-text media). > Quoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: When advocates of Position B argue for accessibility solutions that work automatically with standard markup, and against explicit accessibility-specific markup, sometimes advocates of Position A see this as being against accessibility. At this point, they may criticize advocates of Position B as being against human rights. They sometimes argue that instead of making normal markup work well, we should force authors to add more accessibility-specific markup; it is sometimes claimed that various laws may require this. >> Unquoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: Well I think the most important criticism of position B for our purposes is that they do seem to oppose accessibility related markup and often times even simply oppose explicit semantic markup just because it may have an accessibility side-effect as a benefit (like @headers). > Quoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: I hope you can see how this may be frustrating. I think advocates of Position B are mostly sincere in their belief that their approach is the better way to improve accessibility. Many of them have been in the trenches of slogging through bad markup, and have little faith in the likely benefit of complex authoring requirements, compared to heuristics that can work on general-purpose content. But simply because of their disagreement about technical they are labelled as being against accessibility. >> Unquoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: This is not merely a technical disagreement. Both positions agree that UAs should follow accessibility guidelines. Both positions agree that text should be spoken in aural browsers (as an example). The disagreement — as you yourself have posed it — is over whether HTML should do any more for authors and users. In other words is there any semantic features that HTML can include that will improve the experience of disadvantaged users when compared to other non-HTML approaches. I've said this before, but it bears repeating. HTML's focus on semantics is what makes it a a leader in providing accessible content. The goals of semantic markup and accessibility go hand-in-hand: because semantic markup presumes nothing about its presentation (whether aurally, tactilely or visually). Adding a few other features like TABLE@summary, TD@abbr, and non-text media fallback, is just a minor extension of the semantic capabilities already inherent in HTML. > Quoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: It is my sense that this is the frustration that was being expressed in the IRC log you cited. >> Unquoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: Those logs do not exhibit what I would call frustration. Those logs exhibit contempt. > Quoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: On the other hand, sometimes it seems that advocates of Position B ask advocates of Position A to jump through a lot of hoops to justify accessibility features that are already in HTML4. And it may seem that these kinds of hoops are not always required for features that aren't related to accessibility. I think in some ways this is a fair criticism. But I think the best way forward is to carefully examine and justify all HTML features, to make sure we have a solid basis for our working group decisions, and a record of the reasoning. Also, for accessibility features where a key part of the justification is the way such features are handled in existing assistive technologies, it's likely that it was difficult to do the necessary testing because, for example, screen readers are much less readily available than general web browsers. >> Unquoting Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>: Again, this sounds like you're saying that lets justify the features not included in the present draft and leave those features in the present draft (and not justified) alone. This sounds like the same double standard we here again and again, just expressed in an escalating Orwellian language. Certainly we have the resources and the volunteer support (if we do not chase them all away) to text a handful of HTML4 accessibility features. Though I am trying very hard, it is difficult for me to even begin to understand the position that would advocate the removal of these few small features of HTML that benefit both authors and users. Many of these features already have (at least limited) implementation support. Even the requirements that authors must provide equivalent fallback for non-text media is so easily circumvented (unless laws and other mores intervene) that it's hared to imagine what possible costs could be involved in including these features. If there really is a concern that including accessibility features in HTML will only make authoring more difficult because of legal ramifications, then that's a conversation we should have openly here on this forum. It shouldn't be dealt with by fostering and proliferating an attitude of contempt for accessibility throughout the web community. Take care, Rob
Received on Tuesday, 31 July 2007 06:31:00 UTC