Comic Update: The HTML5 Suggestion Box
July 20, 2009In one of his recent lengthy, marathonesque comments in other people’s blog posts, John Allsopp said the following quote in response to Bruce Lawson’s post HTML is a mess: “I guess one of the reasons folks are resorting to raising their legitimate concerns in public fora, rather than directly with the HTML WG (or should that be the WhatWG, or maybe both?) is possible they don’t have a tonne of faith in the process.”
This comment by John sent me down several interesting paths of consideration. Firstly, it made me think that Mr. Allsopp might spend more time writing in other people’s blogs than his own, much like Jeff Croft (who I had the fortune to see at Refresh Bellingham last week) appears to spend more time in every other city in America than the one in which he lives.
Secondly, I briefly thought that I’d start spelling “ton” (American spelling) like “tonne” (which appears to be the Australian, and I’ll bet also the UK spelling). I quickly discarded that plan, since it’d just limit my word count in Twitter. Which made me wonder, do Japanese users of Twitter get to use kanji in their tweets? If so, that seems highly unfair. They could fit a War & Peace sized comment in a single tweet that way. (Note to self: learn Japanese.)
Finally I really got to the meat of what he said in that sentence (one of many that expressed his thoughts on the mess topic Bruce had posted about). Why should you or I bother with figuring out how the hell to send an email to the proper mailing lists for the HTML5 WG? Or the WHAT WG? Heck, I’m not even sure which group is more relevant. The former has more technical authority, but the latter is actually making all the calls. RDFa, ARIA, and other fruits of the loins of other W3C chartered working groups are being disregarded by the HTML5 people consistently, or being carefully argued away with a pleading for use cases, a suggestion that their expertise is flawed, or that alternate solutions (read that: the WHAT WG’s solutions) are the better option.
People who’ve spent decades in service to their fields are being shot down by non-experts. Consider the issues with accessibility. Laura Carlson recently sent a proposal (signed by a lot of notables including accessibility guru John Foliot and HTML5 doctor in residence Bruce Lawson) that suggested the audacious idea that there be a formal procedure that describes how HTML5 will seek accessibility guidance from the W3C WAI groups.
HTML5 editor-for-life Ian Hickson evaded the issue by listing all the unanswered questions he has waiting on such topics instead of addressing the proposal. Sam Ruby one-upped Ian by expressing his disappointment that the proposal even existed.
In a situation like this, where motivated, caring experts in their fields are being ignored or deflected when using the official channels, why should your average John Everyweb even consider unraveling the process involved enough to attempt to address concerns, knowing the almost certain result of such efforts?
I can’t think of any motivating reasons.
Today’s comic features John Foliot (representing accessibility efforts) submitting such a suggestion to the HTML5 group(s), with my squirrel alter ego looking on in horror at the results. Consider it a softened metaphor that reflects my own growing dismay at the direction HTML5 seems to be heading when working with others.
Yes, I was pretty surprised that Sam Ruby told us in a headmasterly way that he was “disappointed”. I expected him to tell us that we’d let him down, the Web down and most importantly, we’d let ourselves down, and then be made to sit in our bedroom for an hour and think very carefully about what we’d done.
Getting involved in writing standards requires more time, I think, than most working professionals can afford to spend. From my rather sporadic attention to the HTML5 issue I’ve noticed what seems to me to be a fatal flaw in the standards-creation process: the lack of true professional organizations for web designers/developers, through which we can participate in the process.
If one looks at the history of other standards bodies, e.g. ANSI (founded by engineering societies) and MARC 21 (created by librarians), professional organizations played an important role in the process of creating standards. It seems that with web standards, the most influential voices are those of the browser manufacturers, who have the resources and motivation to control the standards creation process.
What if web designers had an organization like the AIGA? It might be harder then for those who currently control the working group to shrug off the proposals of individuals, if those individuals could leverage the clout & prestige of a professional organization. Such an organization could also devote resources to streamlining the avenues through which its members could participate in and influence the standards-creation process. The current system is (I think) needlessly bloated, overloaded with numerous and confusing entry points (“HTML5 WG? Or the WHAT WG?” Incubator groups?) and hampered by an archaic communication system (an email listserv, for godssake) and arcane language.
I think we’re reaching a crisis point with web standards. If this disconnect between the standards bodies and the actual users of web standards continues, we might see more designers/developers abandoning the headache altogether and relying upon proprietary (but more predictable & stable) platforms upon which to work.
@Bruce: Funny Bruce, I *did* sit in my bedroom for near an hour composing a response for Sam, who apparently does not take the Formal Proposal seriously enough to address the content – instead he’s “disappointed” (welcome to the club Sam). If enough people believe that the request is legitimate and worth implementing, please say so by emailing the public-html mailing list (public-html-request@w3.org) or if you are unable to do that, feel free to forward your comments to me and i will pass them on.
@Adrienne: A few points.
1) To my mind (and others) the W3C *is* the professional body you seek – it is unfortunate that WHAT WG continues to run in parallel, but there you have it. Within the W3C there are numerous groups that focus on a specific area of interest/expertise (accessibility, web fonts, RDFa, etc.), and if you feel you have contributions to make to any of those groups, please do so. By policy, most of these groups have ‘official’ channels for commentary – for example the web accessibility initiative has the Protocols and Formats Working Group: http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/Overview.html who have just announced the creation of a Task Force to look at the very real issues surrounding the accessibility of the canvas element: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jul/0562.html The real issue however is that the current editor does not feel bound to take the contributions of these expert groups with any more ‘weight’ than the average Joe off the street (with no offense to the Joes out there who may very well be qualified to comment on any particular subject)
2) Communication via listserve – yes, it might seem clunky in the world of twitter and on-line instant chat, but how else can you accommodate a diverse and global body of contributors? Many of the active participants that I communicate with (in the area of web accessibility) live in such regions as Norway, UK, Germany and Australia – all in different time-zones. Listserves provide threaded, search-able archives that allow for such asynchronous discussion: if you have a better means to ensure inclusiveness then speak up; what I (and others) abhor however is the current practice that the WHAT WG authors group uses, which is IRC – it has it’s uses, but is hardly an inclusive environment – unless of course you are a vampire and need no sleep .
You left out the bit where Ian Hickson of the HTML-WG replied to an email from the chair of the PFWG, and the chair ignored his email, then bizarrely accused Hixie of ignoring her email, then when pressed, finally replied saying the PFWG don’t reply to emails from individuals. Teh funnies!
Self-appointed ‘concerned’ individuals: “We PROPOSE more collaboration between the WAI and the HTML-WG”
Hixie and Ruby: “How about, as a start, um, replying to our emails?”
Self-appointed ‘concerned’ individuals: “How dare you! Must you be so arrogant?”
I don’t entirely disagree with the (admittedly rather egotastic) proposal. I do think it was sent to the wrong working group.
Japanese tweets aren’t particularly compact. Chinese tweets, though, can convey an amazing amount of information… 140 *words*, essentially.
jd/adobe
@JD – My understanding is Japanese also includes kanji, and as a result, allows for 140 words under such a circumstance. I have no clue, I’ll admit, as to whether kanji sees much use by the Japanese in desktop computer situations (I can’t personally imagine how much of a pain enabling the ability to type all those characters is).
(please ‘scuse me for veering so radically off-topic…. ;-)
You’re right about the kanji being available in Japanese tweets, but inflections and prepositions are handled by hiragana, and foreign words handled by katakana, and that’s where the size-advantage is lost.
Korean is interesting, because each character is an entire syllable… I haven’t benchmarked, but Chinese is the most compact I’ve seen, Korean may be second-most compact, and Japanese and English may be at rough parity, depending on the level of informality and abbreviation of the speech.
Meanwhile, pity the Germans…. ;-)
I have little to add to what has been said on the W3C, seen as how my experience with their official channels is limited to one suggestion sent to one of the CSS 3 editors (which was rejected).
The issue of Twitter’s 140-character limit being unfair to some languages is an interesting one too. Maybe we should do some research on the subject by making a number of “standard” tweets in English and asking people to translate them without regard to character limits.
Japanese is entered by activating an IME (Input Method Editor) and then just typing Latin letters; they get substituted for kanji semi-automatically if desired. If I wanted to type the word for bird (鳥), I’d hit the hotkey for activating Japanese input, then type “tori” (とり), then press space to see the menu of matching kanji (鳥 is the most common, so it’s the first).
Don’t japanese/chinese characters take two bytes each? If so, would they be limited to 80 characters?
I took a couple looks at the mailing list, and one thing that immediately comes to mind is, “Wow, they need Google Wave.” Everyone is copy/pasting everyone else’s emails in full, and then inserting their own annotations.
It would also be good if they could thread the list. It seems it’s only one email at a time. I’ll see if there are options.
At this moment in time, I’ve got other things to do.
Nope. Twitter limits you to 140 characters, regardless of which they are or how many bytes it takes to encode them.
Sorry for commenting on something so old.
140 isn’t properly a character count. We regard it as such because as speakers of English we stick to the ascii range. Twitter allows 140 bytes per tweet. You’d be limited to slightly fewer characters if you’re using multibyte characters (twitter expects utf-8), although at that rate you’d still be able to manage Amelia Bedelia in kanji, if not War and Peace.