Re: Minutes from 16 November 2000 WCAG WG telecon

> You could be as rude as you want, Sean,

Rudeness and harshness are completely distinct.
Actually, I should clear this up here and now: I in no way intend or
intended to be in the slightest bit patronising rude or arrogant towards
Anne. She presents herself as a nice person who is spending a considerable
amount of her free time in conversing with me. If she has interpreted my
comments as being in any way insulting, I fully apologise, and regret not
making myself clearer at the time.
I do tend to say things with a subtle amount of humor, but I tend to forget
that it is impossible to convey that in plain text!

> but you have to remember that
> the purpose of WAI is not to insult people but to teach and guide
> them.  I personally can likely be twenty times more insulting than
> you at your worst, but it accomplishes little in the way of meeting
> the goals of this project.  I suggest that you might want to
> reconsider how you speak to Anne and other members of the group who
> may not hold to your very specific, technical, dogmatic view of the
> web.  Elitism and scorn gets you nowhere.

This entire discussion to me is tounge in cheek. I intend no offence or
rudeness on my part. Sorry if you have interpreted that otherwise: I should
have made myself clearer.


> On the contrary, I think that very few of your adjectives -- besides
> possibly "limited" -- really hold up in a practical analysis.  I think
> that "blatantly illegal" may be the most laughable of those, and before
> you start accusing your fellow working group members of illegal
> activities, I think you had best tone down the rhetoric several
> steps.

Opions on the correct use of adjectives has never been my strong point(!)

> ...but will the Semantic Web have a place?

I'm pretty sure it will. A lot of people are staking their reputations on
it.

> It sounds like a nice (but limited) dream, but I question whether or
> not this proposal should be the one and only guiding vision for the
> web.  In fact, I think that's darn near impossible anyway (the web is
> far beyond the control of anyone person, Saint Berners-Lee or not),
> and the question may likely result from market pressures rather than
> philosophical debates.

Tim Berners-Lee gets an awful lot wrong. But he did invent both the WWW and
HTML, so credit where credit's due. Market pressures are one of the main
things driving the SW.

> That said, I might as well take a bit of time to dispute your
> philosophy anyway.

Please do.

> >and we might as well start getting used to that fact now. Anyone that
> >uses presentational markup is:-
> >1. Well behind the times, for a start
>
> Not necessarily, especially if you consider browser support issues.
> Being "behind the times" is not a bad thing -- remember the idea of
> backwards compatibility?

Forwards compatability is the most important thing, according to DC.

> >2. Abusing the entire principles of SGML and markup in general
>
> You say this with such certainty!  As if those principles were
> holy.  (See the other thread where I commented on this).  To most
> people, the point is meaningless.  So what if these "principles of
> SGML" are ignored?  You have not provided any reason that anyone
> creating a page should -care- if they ignore SGML but their page
> still works for their target audiences.

What if I used <b/ as a piece of my markup? I could still call it markup but
it clearly isn't...<b> is still markup, and it could be legal SGML, but
attaching behaviours to it isn't.

> >3. Does nothing for the accessibility of their site
>
> Actually, there are a number of cases in which presentation can
> enhance the accessibility of a site -- especially (as Anne has
> noted on several occasions) for users who have cognitive disabilities
> as well as general audiences.

True, but we should be using non-markup methods where we can.

> Good application of visual design techniques -- which is very much
> "presentation" and not "semantics" -- can vastly enhance the
> usability and accessibility of a web site.
> It's not so simple to say "presentation BAD, semantics GOOD" when
> talking about web accessibility.  The issue is far more complex
> than you make it out to be.

I have never said that. In fact, the WCAG guidlines state to use
presentation to assist cognitive usability. I'm just saying follow all of te
checkpoints, not the ones that you wish to follow.

> Add to the mix the fact that many semantic enhancements are _not_
> used by existing user agents and assistive technology, and you can
> easy get a "semantics-rich" web site that is THEORETICALLY more
> accessible but in practice LESS accessible to many audiences.

Existing user agents won't have a place in the Web of tomorrow (by
definition). I'm not prepared to discuss that, because it will take more
hours of searching for quotes...

> >4. Ensures that the SW is dragged down just a little bit further
>
> You say this as if it were necessarily a bad thing.  This "semantic
> web" is just one person's holy grail.  Please don't assume that it is
> a universal goal.

It is because the definition of the SW can be whatever the SW developers
want it to be.

> Again, you have not provided any reason that anyone would necessarily
> care about this "semantic web" vision.

Doesn't mean there isn't one.

> >5. Has generally evaluated the entire Web architecture situation
incorrectly
>
> I disagree with this.  I think that you are short-sighted on this
> issue and clouded by your own dogmatic approach (not sure where you
> learned it, but it is obvious that you are parroting back what you
> have heard somewhere, and you believe it to be gospel truth).

It is baed on a lot of experience in this matter. It is the culmination of a
lot of things that I have been involved with: SGML, XHTML, XML, CSS, SW, RDF
and whatever else I do.

> >I see that I am fighting a pointless battle here, especially when you
refer
> >to SGML as SMTL...
>
> I see that you are trying to attack Anne as a person and playing a
> very elitist, "I know SGML better than you" strategy.

No, no, no: Anne seems to be as far as I can tell a very nice person. The
fact that she would spend so long contributing to this discussion proves
that. I just pointed out that as she refers to SGML as SMTL, she obviously
doesn't want to discuss SGML, because he doesn't feel she needs to learn
about it. That's fine! The problem is that that is one of the core tenets of
my disagreement.

> If you can't handle the fact that there will be people who
> don't know the right acronyms, then you probably don't want to be on
> this working group.

See above: i.e. no offence intended. If Anne takes it as a personal
criticism, I hereby declare that it wasn't any form of "personal attack",
and offer my full apologies for not making that clear.

> >Presentational markup is wrong for a great many reasons, but at the end
of
> >the day it is still wrong. No matter how much you argue on the matter,
you
> >could never convince me, or the majority of experienced Web programmers,
and
> >I hope you'll come to realise *why*.
>
> Presentational markup is quite fine and appropriate.  It just depends
> on how you use it.  Statements such as "presentational markup is
> wrong" are naive and short-sighted.

That is the end result of what I have been trying to prove: it is the
logical conclusion.

> Maybe I'm not as experienced a web designer as you are -- I've only
> been doing this professionally since 1994, mind you -- but I think
> that claiming the majority of experienced web authors believe
> presentation to be "wrong" is very naive; you are believing your
> own rhetoric here.  The majority of experienced people who design
> for the web are very much concerned with presentational markup.
> This should be self-evident; if your scenario were true, then surely
> there would be no accessibility problems whatsoever!

Again, I can only base my quotes and ideas on my experience. My experience
is that people realise attaching behaviours to markup is redundant.

> But as one of those experienced web programmers, I think it's
> important to point out that presentational markup is very useful
> when you are creating specific presentations (such as XHTML, WML,
> VoiceXML interfaces or XSL-FO output) for specific devices.  XSLT
> pretty much begs to be applied to a presentational language based
> on XML, and to claim that "no no it's SGML, it can't be presentational!"
> is pretty darn short-sighted and frighteningly dogmatic.

XSL-FO has had many criticisms from the XML community.

> >  > .... let's not separate presentation from strucure and semantics
> >>  so much as coordinate presentation features into structure and
semantics.
> >>  Bear in mind that presentation includes both visual and auditory
> >  > elementents ... as well as elements that work in speech readers and
> >  > braille presentations.
> >I'm not saying get rid of presentation.
>
> No, just that it's "wrong"?

No: presentation is great. Presentational markup on the other hand isn't a
good idea.

> I think Anne actually has it more right.

Neither of us is ever going to be 100% correct...

> I think the problem is the
> misuse of presentation -- and this is the approach taken in the
> WAI guidelines -- not the existence of presentation altogether.  I
> think it is very important that presentation and semantics be
> coordinated; this view that they are completely separate is as
> dangerous as the view that only presentation matters.

They aren't separate as far as working together. But they shouldn't be
combined.

> >I'm not saying graphics and scripts
> >should be removed from pages. I'm saying don't use markup to assert
> >behavioural styles and expect it to work in the future: because it won't
> >(hooray!).
>
> It won't?  I'm glad I don't have _your_ crystal ball, I'd have to
> return it to the magic shop for a tune-up. :)

Once again, do you use pure XML? You can't attach behaviours to that...

> _and_ I think you're not very good at explaining.  This is why you
> feel you are spending hours saying it.

Probably.

> Also, you make statements such as "illegal", and you state that markup
> can't be used for presentation.  This seems to be an overly narrow view
> of markup and the term "illegal", just thrown out there, is overly
> inflammatory.

It goes against an ISO standard...

> > I'd like to give a new example:-
> Oh boy.

Tell me about it!

>       <boldtext>bold text</boldtext>
>       <str>strong text</str>
>
> Clearly, the first is preferable to the second!  I can tell by reading
> the tag name "boldtext" what it is meant to say, but the second "str"
> is meaningless.  What is that?  Is it a string?  A stereo?  A street?
> Who knows?  This, then, is what the semantic web is all about:  you
> can discern the meaning from the "boldtext" tag, but the "str" tag
> is clearly opaque to inspection and should not be used.
> >depending on that meaning. BTW: The vision of the Semantic Web was
created
> >by the same guy who invented the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee.
>
> You mean Saint Tim Berners-Lee.

No, I mean Mr. Berners-Lee. And you accuse me of being patronising!

> Just as a favor, can you be a little more insulting to Anne?

Once again, no offence intended.

> Way to play that elitist newcomer punk role.

I should have been an actor...
I'm pretty sure people really don't care what I have to say, but I'm not
forcing anyone to take note. Many people *do* agree with me, and many people
don't. I couldn't really care less one way or the other: each to their own.
As for punk, I like the Sex Pistols, but I'm more into Bob Dylan...

Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
http://xhtml.waptechinfo.com/swr/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/
"Perhaps, but let's not get bogged down in semantics."
   - Homer J. Simpson, BABF07.

Received on Monday, 20 November 2000 18:04:33 UTC