In the past I’ve made it fairly clear that I disagree with a lot of the decisions that HTML5 editor Ian Hickson has made in the past, such as the movement of the WHATWG version of HTML5 into Last Call (well before the W3C has done so, creating an oddball situation where arguably the spec exists in two different states). I felt that he was making a decision to move the spec forward to meet an arbitrary timetable, and not because it was mature enough to deserve that state.

Now that the WHATWG has gone onto its version-free HTML Utopia, leaving the W3C to make sure there’s a benchmark for browser vendors to compare against with what us mere mortals are still calling HTML5, I had hoped that at the very minimum we could rely on a standard that would properly address all the issues before declaring itself an adult.

I was wrong.

Accessibility is an issue that gets me worked up at times. While observing the various battles in the mailing lists of the W3C, it becomes clear that often those most aware of good practices for accessibility are given the least amount of attention by decision makers. Right now we’re witnessing the W3C’s chairs pushing for HTML5 to move to Last Call while ignoring a massive lump of requested data about an accessibility issue.

AKA: They’re moving the spec forward without addressing existing, outstanding issues.

Today’s comic highlights my opinions on that.

It seems that as a result we’re going to end up with a standard that will only address best practice for accessibility as some sort of later patch. This is a load of crap.

For some reason, several smart people think the longdesc attribute is hard to use. So hard to use that we’d best not even bother keeping it in HTML5 as a means to provide alternate text for images to sight-challenged web users.

I’m going to tell you how to do it in a detailed fashion, and you can decide if it’s hard: 1. Put a longdesc attribute on your image with a value that points to a url of a page with a detailed description of the image. 2. At that destination, write the description.

Pretty hard stuff, right? I don’t know if you can remember all that.

This culminated last August as Issue 30, where the working group chairs decided to leave longdesc out due to a lack of data, and they encouraged people to feel free to get more data and approach them again.

In fact, I quote:

This issue can be reopened if new information come up. Examples of possible relevant new information include: use cases that specifically require longdesc, evidence that correct usage is growing rapidly and that that growth is expected to continue, or widespread interoperable implementation.

Laura Carlson took them at their word, creating a research document with over 150 examples harvested from the “wild” and compiled into several use cases, along with relevant local laws and policies from governmental and corporate entities using the attribute.

Armed with a treasure trove of the requested data, she asked the chairs to re-0pen the issue to consider it before Last Call.

Sam Ruby, W3C HTML5 Co-Chair, says “Thanks for all the data. I know I asked for it. But no. Focus on other important stuff instead. Ha ha.” (That might be a bit flavored of a paraphrasing…)

I couldn’t help but read into that an unspoken “Addressing the needs of blind people should take a back seat to getting the spec out the door.”

Class act, guys.

Featuring Jeffrey Zeldman, Jeremy Keith and Dave Shea, today’s comic highlights what makes good people on the Internet into great people.

Humanity, it seems, is destined to fight with itself over every little detail. That’s probably not new information to you.

Thanks to the Internet, we don’t even need stamps or to be in someone’s physical presence to have these arguments. As anyone with a net connection knows, this means we will get into heated, acrimonious fights over topics as unimportant as who the hell was Papa Smurf’s partner in creating his dozens of smurf offspring. And we’ll stew over it. And we’ll 386 someone because of it. And we’ll lose sleep and remove friends from Facebook over it.

As as developer/designer who follows the same category of people on Twitter, many of the Internet fights I witness involve web standards, the tools we use as developers, the erotic-sounding but thoroughly disappointing topic of hashbangs and anything in between. Heck, I participate in these brawls, throwing acorns at the whole mess.

There’s a lot of reasons for these fights, but most often we argue because we care. The products we make as professionals mean a lot to us. We want the best for our medium and our industry, and so we get trenchant about Flash, HTML5, naming conventions, design techniques or the proper shade of blue. Because to us it matters. It matters a lot. And there is nothing wrong with that level of passion about your work. Quite the opposite. If you can’t imagine yourself fiercely defending what you do as an occupation, maybe you need a different career.

However, in the process we frequently seem to forget that we’re dealing with other people. Passionate people, some of which are just as informed as we are. Or even more so. And believe it or not, they’re entitled to have arrived at different conclusions than us. Yet, so often something about the Internet seems to boil away the concept of the right to respectfully disagree.

Last week, Zeldman and Keith got into a debate over a blog post by Andy Rutledge on the subject of Kickstarter. At times it seemed heated, and due to the nature of the medium they were debating in it was both very public and very abrupt. Then the next day Zeldman posted a series of tweets carefully reiterating his view, made it clear that Keith was his friend and simply saying “sorry” for the whole confusion. In front of an audience of 144,000 followers. Jeremy replied in the same vein.

It shouldn’t seem amazing that two people apologize over a fight in public. But somehow, on today’s Internet, it’s all but unheard of.

There’s a strange comfort in knowing that our Internet heroes are just as capable of the same fallacies we are.

It’s inspiring to see them follow it up by providing good examples by rising to a level of good behavior we rarely get to witness in social media today.

I’ve termed this sudden cessation of hostilities (without ceding the value of each party’s opinions) as a “nacho moment“, so named thanks to a moment of intentional, deliberate hilarity by Dave Shea best summarized by this pair of tweets. It’s a testament to his actions that I don’t even recall what large debate was going on before his tweets, but do know that afterward the Internet got a little less contentious and the Seattle area’s nacho sales rose just a bit.

Don’t stop caring about the things you care about, whether it’s the Smurfs or funding crowdsourcing. But when you’re in a debate, have a nacho moment and remember you’re talking to other people. People who also care.

Today’s comic features Yahoo employee Jonathan Snook and (former employee) Nicole Sullivan getting the Squirrel’s help in digging a fresh grave.

I use Delicious. (That link may not work much longer… Hooray for link rot.) A lot. Heck, just today I was updating my (last minute) Christmas wish list by cleverly attaching the “wishlist” tag to items I wouldn’t object to seeing in my stocking. Fellow Mindfly designer Erica literally shrieked when she learned of the site’s fate, and is now scrambling for some replacement location to store her lovely bookmarks.

I can’t say I know how Delicious was supposed to monetize, but I’m getting tired of the amount of future deadlinks Yahoo seems to be putting the world through, first with GeoCities and now Delicious (and others) and who knows what in the future. Flickr?

I hope not. I actually pay for Flickr. And how the heck else will I share my cute cat photos? Yfrog? Gag.

There’s options out there to export Delicious bookmarks into. I’m considering my options, but at the moment, Pinboard is getting a lot of recommendations on the tubes.

Rest in peace, Delicious. You didn’t deserve to die so young.

Today’s comic features Justin McDowell (web designer and founder of Ignite Lincoln) and the Squirrel dealing with the decidedly first world problem of a slow broadband connection while discussing Chilean miners. In short, it’s all about tubes.

I’m claustrophobic to an incredible degree, a trait I attribute to my lifelong battle with asthma and my general impression that smaller spaces contain less air. I cannot fathom what spending over two months trapped a half-mile underground in a collapsed mine must be like. It’s amazing that the men involved have held together as well as they have, and almost as incredible is everything that’s been delivered safely to them through a four-inch wide, half-mile long tube. Sandwiches, drinks, videos, clothing, books.

The fact that they’re about to be winched upwards to the surface world says something about how humans can come together in such trying times to accomplish something so incredibly difficult.

It’s entirely trite to compare such a feat to broadband Internet access. But I’m going there, because I’m a classy guy. Both my home connection and that of my workplace go through Comcast. Over the past week, both locations have had service levels I could compare to my 1995 dial-up connection when I’d log in to play Ultima Online or spend fifteen minutes downloading one naughty photo. What I’m trying to say is that hand-delivering the packets of information would result in a faster speed than what I’m currently experiencing.

What drives me crazy about such things is that for all extents and purposes, this is exactly what Comcast promises. Any of their service packages guarantee up to a maximum level of service, but not a minimum.

I’d like to repeat that. I pay them good money to guarantee that they won’t exceed a level of service, but they can fall as short of that as they please. I wonder how well that would work for other business models. Buy up to a whole hamburger… but maybe you’ll get just the bun. Buy up to a whole website… but maybe you’ll just get a half-finished splash page.

It’s a classic old gem at this point, but I think Penny Arcade’s treatment of the topic goes straight to the point of how I’d prefer to pay such a variable service.

The overall poor quality of American broadband access in comparison to other first-world nations is something I could rant about for hours. Instead I’ll get over myself, link you this hilarious hat picture of Justin I found while getting reference photos of him for the comic, and wish the miners all the best luck in the final hours of their ordeal. ¡Vive Chile!

An Event Apart: DC is running at this very moment. I am not there, sadly, but I am living the experience vicariously through A Feed Apart (which is awesome and you should check it out now) Via that very feed, I learned of applause, as unlikely as it sounds, that Dan Cederholm led the crowd in for IE9. Today’s comic memorializes that event, and also includes Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, the two dudes without whom this awesome conference would not exist. (It turns out they’re also very awesome in person. Really. They don’t bite or anything.)

Seriously, if you ever can get to an AEA event, I implore you to go. It’s an awesome experience being surrounded by like-minded web geeks getting leading edge advice and techniques for that thing we do with making the web.

Look, let’s drop the issue of tribe for the moment: IE9 is a better browser than IE8, period. I won’t make it my steady gal, but it’s helping push the web in the right direction by getting Microsoft’s behemoth back on track with everyone else. I’m glad someone at AEA decided to lead the crowd in acknowledging that fact.