the 200ok weblog

Some people lead, some follow; some do the inspiration, some do the perspiration. Then there are some people who think big, keep the faith and manage to do the lot.

Joe Clark has a big idea and deserves our support. The work he does is important yet particularly thankless... now we have a chance to change that with the launch of Joe Clark Micropatronage.

Joe's worth a fiver, in fact he's worth a lot more than that but it's all he asks: donate a little, making it possible for him to raise a lot. We're not funding the project, we're funding Joe so he can do the big stuff. If you have questions, Joe has probably answered them - see "Additional Facts" (scroll to the end). You can't buy honesty like that :)

Go on, you'll feel good about it. Joe will keep you informed about where the money went. If you can't donate, then you can support the effort by pimp...err....promoting it with banners, diggs or whatever floats your boat.

Today's hot tip: code works better when you drink coffee and listen to The Clash.

That is all.

So, there's a coordinated call for feedback on the WHATWG's activities. There's a lot to cover in the call to action, so I'll just start with some thoughts about HTML...

I haven't read the WHATWG HTML 5 and Forms 2 specs "properly", so much as skimmed them. Forgive me, they are big specs with draft status from an as-yet unrecognised group. I don't read W3C specs for fun either ;) So this is mostly off the top of my head, you'll have to excuse me if something is already covered and I've missed it.

Headings and sections

I rather like the XHTML 2 version of headings and sections, as opposed to HTML 5's current system which seems to inherit all the problems of HTML 4 and none of the advantages of XHTML 2.

• Why limit things to just six heading levels?
• Why not declare hn as an extensible set of headings?
• Why use specific headings if you're using sections - just set a heading for each section and let nesting take care of the rest.

I'm not a fan of the W3C's specific example though, since I feel that each section should start immediately with a heading. I'd like to see the strong sections removed. But otherwise this system seems simple and elegant to me (although maybe I'm just weird - I'm aware that's a possibility!):

<body>
<h>This is a top level heading</h>
<p>....</p>
<section>
    <p>....</p>
    <h>This is a second-level heading</h>
    <p>....</p>
    <h>This is another second-level heading</h>
    <p>....</p>
</section>
<section>
    <p>....</p>
    <h>This is another second-level heading</h>
    <p>....</p>
    <section>
        <h>This is a third-level heading</h>
        <p>....</p>
    </section>
</section>
</body>

In anticipation of the argument "documents shouldn't be so big they need more than six levels", I'll simply suggest you go and convince all the world's lawyers and legislators then get back to me :) Besides, it's entirely possible to have more than six levels in a short document that would not be suitable for presentation in multiple web pages.

Better lists

I think <ol>, <ul> and <dl> should all have a <caption> element or a way to explicitly associate a heading. We're grouping information together after all, I think it makes sense to be able to explicitly state what the grouping is all about. It's one of the really useful things you can do with tables.

I also think ordered lists need more sophisticated numbering systems - we should not have to resort to CSS or use invalid code! eg. we should be able to start an <ol> from, say, 11; because 1-10 were on another page. I'm specifically thinking of search results which are commonly split into multiple pages, yet each page should not restart the list count . Currently it's only valid to set the value of each <li>, which is absurd - so the HTML 5 spec's .

Labels for radio button groups

I don't think HTML 4.01 provides a satisfactory method of labelling/captioning a group of radio buttons. Each radio button gets a label; but really the group needs something to describe the purpose of the set of inputs.

You can use a <fieldset> + <legend> combination for short descriptions, but it feels like a hack (not to mention the practicalities of hacking CSS to get browsers to display long legends!).

Captions for images

I'm not quite sure how this could be approached; but I think a visible caption for images would make sense. Hidden text could then be more akin to longdesc than alt. The <object> element provides an excellent model for alternate content, but not a caption.

The cite attribute

While this is ok, I do wonder at the requirement for a URI. How do I choose a URI to cite Shakespeare for example? What one single URI makes sense? Plus long experience shows us that URIs don't live forever - who remembers to check their cite URIs?

So why not an attribute for the name of the person and an attribute for the title of the work they are being quoted from? Sure, there's potential for ambiguity, but don't try to tell me a URI could not lead to a document which talks about ten John Smiths.

<p creator="covenant" work="we want revolution" cite="http://www.google.com.au/search?&q=%22we+want+revolution%22+covenant+lyrics">we want revolution<br />
constant evolution<br />
start your engines blow your fuses<br />
burn the bridges for the future<br />
this is our solution</p>

The <cite> element

<cite> doesn't make any sense to me either, since there's no explicit association with a quote. Take the example from the HTML 5 draft:

<p><q>This is correct!</q>, said <cite>Ian</cite>.</p>

So long as there is only one Q/CITE pair in the entire document, we're ok. After that, we're just guessing - and while a human might guess fairly well, an indexing system has no grasp of human context. So, perhaps a for attribute is in order:

<p><q id="ians-assertation">This is correct!</q>, said <cite for="ians-assertation">Ian</cite>.</p>

The <iframe> element

Why keep <iframe> in HTML 5 when the spec also includes <object>? Straight question. From a quick read, <object> seems to take care of everything that <iframe> can offer.

More...

The HTML 5 spec includes quite a few all-new elements such as <nav>, <x>, <m> and <progress>. Some are relatively logical, but others like <progress> just seem very odd to me. A progress bar is not a permanent content item, it's a temporary state. However I'll save real discussion of these elements for another day.

So what do you think? Join the discussion!

So, Web Directions South 2006 has been and gone. Workshops done, speeches made, drinks drunk, geeks very drunk and hundreds of photos on Flickr to prove it. My email inbox has been inundated with messages from various systems informing me that I'm connected, shared, tagged and released :)

Those of you who were kind enough to drop by and see Cheryl and I speak may recall me talking about "being part of something". The point is, we are part of a worldwide group of people working hard to make the web a better place. I encourage everyone to take part, leap in and get involved; and to seek comfort within the community when the job hands us a bad day.

Less formally, some of you may recall Molly and I at the Pump House extolling the virtues of our wonderful tribe. Tribe? Well, yes. Modern life is tribal - we find ourselves in huge cities but associate ourselves with smaller groups within that population. Tribes, in other words. Online, we can associate with like-minded individuals from around the planet. Occasionally at events like WD06 we are lucky enough to get large numbers of these people into the same room.

The only downside is that so many of them have to leave again afterwards :)

You really can't sum up an event like WD06. As Nick has observed, talking about it requires name-dropping and worst of all you might miss someone. Part of the wonder of the event is the fact there are no barriers between the punters and the speakers. That simple fact was probably the most important thing I learned at WE05.

So best of all this year was the excitement of knowing I'd be catching up with friends. You know who you are and you don't need XFN, tags or connections to know it :)

[Semi liveblogged]

Right now anything is possible. Right now the energy is there...

Part one: the human essence. I'm studying what it means to be human in the sense of how we interact with technology, or when they're in groups.... so to do that I want to get to some basic ideas about humans. So I have to peel back some layers.

Humans are social animals. Why are we social? If we are social you will live longer - you are less likely to get eaten by a lion if there's someone else there yelling "look out, there's a lion".

We model all social interactions, which is not easy - it takes us years to learn how to do it. We have bigger brains than earlier primates so that we can hold a bigger social network in our heads.

Here's the dark secret of social networks: they are a lot of work. Who has the time? People just can't keep them really current. The systems are passive - they wait for you to feed that information to them. If you don't feed them, they die.

What could be going is so much more profound than what is actually going on. Time is the new non-renewable resource.

If I have a serious social network, why am I not using that information to filter SPAM?

We all create a data shadow every time we're online - email, URLs, IM, Skype... all this information could tell us who is important and why. But we don't use this information - it all gets poured on the floor.

Aside: Mark mentioned that you can't get SMS and call information off your mobile phone. Actually, my Motorola V3 lets me connect with USB and dump my text messages onto my hard drive. I was keeping SMS messages long before by transcribing the important ones, now it's easy. SMS messages have too many precious messages from friends! I don't want to lose that.

Mark points out that while we might think we don't have an emotional relationship with our mobile phones, but if we lose them we're really upset. We lose our social networks!

Enough talk! Mark developed a way to collect information via Bluetooth to capture the data shadow of someone carrying a Bluetooth mobile. They set it up for a week at a conference and they were able to show relationships for each person.

"The street finds its own use for things, uses its makers never intended." - William Gibson

This is not a bubble. This is not hype. This is where we're going: you-biquity!

[Semi liveblogged]

Being aware of verbosity settings in screen readers - it's the setting which controls how things like punctuation are handled. Some users will turn off brackets - ie. brackets aren't read out. With that setting enabled, page links may get missed - really it's a bug, but you have to be aware of it.

Best practice is to make links make sense out of context; but at the same time users know they can "go back one line" to find context.

Screen reader users often get much more information from their UA than sighted users - the status of links may be read out "this is a visited link, this is an unvisited link..."

"Back to top" links... do we really want to go back to the top? Or do we really want to go back to the start of the article we just read? Where exactly should the link take you? This is not just an accessibility issue, it's a usability issue as well. If you don't have a skip to content link, they have to listen through all of your header and navigation content...

Regarding skip to content and skip navigation links, Derek believes the browsers should be handling things like this.

Derek: "As a keyboard user, Opera is the best browser out there right now." Yay Opera! ;) It's very powerful and lets you jump between forms AND links; or through headings; or you can ensure the accesskeys don't clash with anything.

You know the way we only use about 10% of our brains? Well it's the same with our software - we only use about 10% of the functionality.

Russ Weakley: we found that source order didn't really matter so much to a lot of screen reader users.
Molly: what about other disabilities?
Derek: Did you see CSS Naked day? That day was hell for me! Nothing worked for me! I lost all my context. "I couldn't read blogs that day and that's my crack man!"
Molly: I do think that it's a concern; that we shouldn't be too quick to give a message that source order isn't important. For screen readers it's not so important...
Russ: One thing we did in that test was to label each content section - structural labels were really useful. [Helped context]

Derek: on source order... what about things like sidebars? Do they go at the end, or the start? We need to research this stuff because we don't know what we're doing.

Andrew Arch: Visual order... there are plenty of people out there who can get very confused if the visual order doesn't match the source order. Tabbing through content can suddenly get way out of order compared with the expectation set by the visual design.

Derek: we think we know it all but we need to do more actual research.

Andy Clarke: What do you think about microformats and using them to set up labels for content areas?
Derek: I like the idea, but how do we get everyone to adopt it and implement it?

John Allsopp has started a design pattern to explore this issue.

"I know we can do this... I'm getting goosebumps again!"

Example: a login screen example where the page gets modified based on input. Notifying the user is an issue because they've moved away from the relevant inputs; so you should update other things like the LEGEND, TITLE, or status bar.

Status bar - screen readers can access the information in the browser's status bar. How appropriate! Put status messages in there. Needs full testing and probably depends on screen reader settings as to whether it's read out or not. But you could also alert the user that they should check the status bar before they submit a form.

Here's a WD06 moment. I'm sitting between Andrew Krespanis and Andy Clarke. Andy just watched the YouTube video of himself giving Andrew a pair of boxer shorts earlier today, from the post on Nick Cowie's blog.

Web 2.0MFG!!!