dive into mark

While waiting for the start of my first TiVo-enhanced Superbowl experience (skipping through the game and watching the ads), I’ve been catching up on some reading.

• CNET: Kennedy hopes accessible site leads way. Sen. Edward Kennedy’s office unveiled a revamped Web site Tuesday, one of the first congressional sites to fully comply with federal laws requiring accessibility for disabled users. Well, actually, no. The site navigation requires Javascript, and I can’t find any equivalent text links that don’t require Javascript. This means that, other than a few press releases linked from the home page, about 95% of Kennedy’s site is inaccessible to anyone using Lynx (a text-only browser which doesn’t support Javascript), Opera (whose Javascript support is horribly broken), or anyone with Javascript turned off (about 10% of all Internet users). This violates rule L of the Section 508 guidelines: When pages utilize scripting languages to display content, or to create interface elements, the information provided by the script shall be identified with functional text that can be read by assistive technology.
• Paul Ford: Medium of Choice. The web is my medium of choice, not a medium of last resort.
• Jason Orendorff: The path Python module. This module provides a single class that wraps the functionality in the os.path module. You wouldn’t think that would be so helpful, but in practice I find it much more pleasant to write and to read.
• Dean VanDruff: Conversational Cheap Shots. First, we have the Ad Hominem Variants where you attack the person as a way to avoid truth, science, or logic which might otherwise prove you wrong. Next are the Sleight of Mind Fallacies, which act as “mental magic” to make sure the unwanted subject disappears. Then, we move on to Delay Tactics, which are subtle means to buy time when put on the spot. Then, the ever popular Question as Opportunity ploys, where any question can be deftly averted. Finally, we have the General Cheap-Shot Tactics and Irritants, which are basically “below the belt” punches.
• Mac OS X Hints: How to reset your laptop’s power management unit. Dora had this problem with one of her laptop batteries (power drained in less than 1 hour), but the other one worked fine. Resetting the power management unit did nothing to change this. The laptop and both batteries are only a year old.
• Brad Choate: Syndirella wish list. Follow-up on Syndirella mailing list.
• Joel Spolsky: A week of Murphy’s Law gone wild. Weak systems may appear perfectly healthy until neighboring systems break down.
• Sam Ruby: Evolution of the Weblog APIs. Discussion of this essay: Patient Evangelism.

• Ian Hickson: We don’t need the style attribute. If you need a style attribute, then you are probably not writing a semantic document, and therefore there is no reason for you to be using XHTML 2. Ian is a member of the CSS working group, and is one of the authors of the CSS 3 working draft.
• Jeffrey Zeldman: Sounds like a movie we saw once. We get the feeling that XHTML 2’s most ardent supporters think ordinary designers and developers are bad and stupid and backward and intractable, and that only brute force can deliver the semantic web. It’s that disdain for ordinary people and that willingness to use brute force, rather than any particular technical aspect of the proposed XHTML 2 spec, that rubs us way the wrong way.
• Tantek Çelik: On XHTML 2. The biggest problem that I have with XHTML 2 is not just its misnaming/misplacement as a “future version of HTML”, but also the amount of the HTML Working Group’s time that it consumes at the expense of what I think are imminently more important things for the HTML Working Group to work on. Tantek is part of the HTML working group, as Microsoft’s official representative.
• Daniel Glazman: Re: XHTML 2.0 considered harmful. XHTML 2.0 seems to me the live proof that something is going wrong at W3C. I feel that this spec represents a solution maximizing the gap between authors’ needs and industrial standardization compromise.
• Jonny Axelsson: Re: my thoughts on XHTML 2.0. There are no plans, and no charter, for an XHTML 1.2. Jonny is also a member of the HTML working group, and is one of the authors of the XHTML 2.0 working draft.

• To sum up:

  1. XHTML 2 is not backwardly-compatible with XHTML 1, and the authors consider this a feature, not a bug.
  2. XHTML 2 is not meant to be a replacement for XHTML 1, despite having the same name and the next major version number, and being created by the same working group.
  3. If XHTML 2 doesn’t work for you, don’t use it, but the markup language you’re using now won’t ever get any better.

When open-source projects go this horribly wrong, we have a name for what happens next.

When non-open-source specifications go this horribly wrong, what happens next?