Re: Minutes from 16 November 2000 WCAG WG telecon

At 3:11 PM -0800 11/20/00, William Loughborough wrote:
>Sure it seems like a stretch to equate failure to acknowledge the 
>importance of content/style/structure separations while things are 
>working just fine with cyber-pollution, but the people who conceived 
>this stuff and prepare for the next generation of standards aren't 
>some kind of ivory-towerites who are out of touch with "reality" - 
>this is a reality that they not only created, but know a lot about. 
>I'm sure you don't mean to ridicule Tim and the others but they are 
>saying these things, setting these standards, making these 
>predictions from a point of view quite different from the purely 
>"what's good for my company is good for the Web" POV.

I am not saying that I disagree.  I am saying that evidence has not been
presented.

Analogy to environmental issues may work (but it is a sorely stretched
analogy and ultimately one which doesn't work on a number of levels),
but my argument with Sean was that he was presenting an argument which
is based entirely on "we do this because we have decided it is the
right thing" and offers little in the way of explanation as to -why-
it is right.

This is symptomatic of one of the greatest dangers facing the WAI --
to become issuers of dogma instead of constructive technical
advice and solutions.  It is a very easy trap for the Guidelines
working group to fall into -- to say "do this because it is right!"
with the force of "right" behind us, while never really having to
justify our pronouncements.

Setting standards, making predictions, and arguing for the greater
good is all wonderful -- but it has to be backed up with something
other than argument via assertion.  Something isn't true just because
we have decided it is true by definition; the semantic web vision is
_not_ automatically better for the world just because we declare it
is.

This is why I wish to see us steered back onto the path of
practicality; declaring, for example, that all markup which does not
fit our standards is "illegal" will hold little water when it comes
time to see that the web implementors around the world listen to what
we have to say.

I am merely pointing out that "this doesn't support my chosen vision
for the web!" is not a drawback to a specific action; a valid argument
looks more like "this doesn't support my chosen vision for the web,
which is bad because of <x>, <y>, and <z>" -- or even "this is bad
because of <x>, <y>, and <z>" without the pseudo-religious attachments
connected with one specific philosophy which deems all other methods
of web creation as "invalid" and "illegal."

--Kynn
-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Monday, 20 November 2000 18:39:54 UTC