| 00:54 | <TabAtkins> | ...I just caught myself trying to send an email by hitting "Ctrl+X" then "Y" (the chords to save a file in nano). |
| 00:55 | TabAtkins | has been submitting to many commit messages today. |
| 00:55 | <Hixie> | you should use pine |
| 00:55 | <Hixie> | ctrl+x y is how you send mail in pine :-) |
| 00:56 | <Hixie> | (not coincidentally, since nano is a reimplementation of pico, which is pine's mail editor, and they thus all share the same control scheme) |
| 00:57 | <TabAtkins> | I'm plenty happy with Gmail, thank you. |
| 05:18 | <MikeSmith> | fyi - http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-iri/2011Apr/0043.html |
| 05:19 | <MikeSmith> | IETF IRI WG discussion |
| 05:19 | <MikeSmith> | "possible path is to put all the parsing/processing stuff into Adam's document, fast-track that document, and work on 3987bis in parallel" |
| 05:20 | <MikeSmith> | Adam's document being abarth http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abarth-url-00 |
| 05:32 | <othermaciej> | it's interesting that HTML5 doesn't even need an external definition of valid |
| 06:04 | <MikeSmith> | othermaciej: you mean of "valid URL" ? |
| 06:05 | <othermaciej> | yeah |
| 12:42 | <MikeSmith> | even in HTML4, id values are matched case-sensitively, right? |
| 12:59 | <MikeSmith> | checking http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/named-character-references.html in validator.nu, I get some "Text run is not in Unicode Normalization Form C" errors |
| 12:59 | <MikeSmith> | seems like due to 〈 and 〉 |
| 13:00 | <MikeSmith> | U+2329 and U+232A |
| 13:02 | <Philip`> | Would be convenient if the validator told you what the normalised form would be |
| 13:04 | <MikeSmith> | Philip`: indeed |
| 13:04 | <MikeSmith> | I guess that would need to be done in the htmlparser code |
| 13:06 | <MikeSmith> | ah |
| 13:06 | <MikeSmith> | or not |
| 13:07 | <MikeSmith> | ./syntax/non-schema/java/classes/org/whattf/checker/NormalizationChecker.java |
| 13:08 | <MikeSmith> | that doesn't look like fun code :( |
| 13:08 | <MikeSmith> | import com.ibm.icu.text.Normalizer |
| 13:12 | <bga_> | i have <script src="a.js# b.js c"> |
| 13:13 | <bga_> | but in FF3.6 script.src == 'a.js#%20b.js%20c' |
| 13:13 | <bga_> | is it bug? |
| 13:17 | <espadrine> | bga_: looks like an escape bug, yes |
| 13:17 | espadrine | wonders whether script.src is treated specially in this respect. |
| 13:22 | <bga_> | espadrine in FF4 too |
| 13:36 | <david_carlisle> | MikeSmith: 9001, that;s a spec bug, the text has been changed to use the (Unicode 3.1) replacement U+27E8, but the numeric reference to make the glyph is still using the deprecated U+2329 character |
| 13:41 | <david_carlisle> | http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/2007doc/Overview.html#diff-xhtml1 |
| 20:27 | <Hixie> | othermaciej: what did you mean by "HTML5 doesn't even need an external definition of valid [URL]"? |
| 20:38 | <othermaciej> | Hixie: I mean it already defines valid URL based on existing specs |
| 20:38 | <Hixie> | ah right |
| 20:38 | <othermaciej> | so it's not a required interface point for a new spec that defines URL processing |
| 20:38 | <Hixie> | yeah, the only thing we need but don't have yet is rules for parsing and resolving |
| 20:39 | <Hixie> | though actually we even have that now, it's just very buggy |
| 20:42 | <othermaciej> | yep |
| 20:42 | <othermaciej> | Adam is trying to do his best to define less buggy rules |
| 20:42 | <othermaciej> | and Julian is doing his best to stop him |
| 20:42 | <Hixie> | oh? |
| 20:42 | <Hixie> | i didn't realise julian was active in this area any more |
| 20:43 | <othermaciej> | http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-iri/2011Apr/thread.html |
| 20:45 | <Hixie> | sigh |
| 21:30 | <AryehGregor> | Yay, I've gotten embroiled in a controversial and probably fruitless discussion on public-html. |
| 21:32 | AryehGregor | abides by the "only look at a discussion once per day" rule |
| 21:33 | <TabAtkins> | This is the best rule. |
| 21:33 | <TabAtkins> | As long as the discussion isn't clearly useful. |
| 21:33 | <AryehGregor> | Right. |
| 21:33 | <AryehGregor> | Or even if it is clearly useful, but time-consuming. |
| 21:33 | <TabAtkins> | Yes. |
| 21:34 | <othermaciej> | if the discussion isn't useful, you probably should not participate |
| 21:35 | <othermaciej> | AryehGregor: I appreciate that you gave a first-hand testimonial of the validation pressure effect on authoring tool implementors |
| 21:35 | <othermaciej> | if that is the discussion you mean |
| 21:35 | <othermaciej> | I do think it might be getting past the point of usefulness |
| 21:53 | <AryehGregor> | othermaciej, I'll be cautious in replying further when I next look at the discussion, on Sunday. |
| 21:54 | <AryehGregor> | It would be nice if the accessibility people and the other people could actually understand each other's viewpoints properly, but I don't have much of any hope for that, so arbitration via Change Proposal seems like the best course for the time being. |
| 21:54 | <othermaciej> | hober: we should probably do a survey of HTML authoring tools at Apple and what they do about alt, and what reasons their owners give for that |
| 21:55 | <AryehGregor> | othermaciej, FWIW, the apple.com homepage appears to have exactly correct alt text for every image, while microsoft.com has terrible alt text. |
| 21:55 | <hober> | othermaciej: good idea; added to my todo list |
| 21:55 | <othermaciej> | hober: we have a lot of those (Mail, TextEdit, iWeb, iPhoto (photo web page export), wiki server…) |
| 21:55 | <othermaciej> | probably more that I am not thinking of |
| 21:56 | <hober> | *nod( |
| 21:56 | <othermaciej> | AryehGregor: our Web designers are very particular |
| 21:56 | <AryehGregor> | Also, a blind MediaWiki user I once spoke to told me that the built-in screen reader in OS X is one of the best out there, and the ones for Windows and Linux are terrible (plus the Windows ones are unreasonably expensive). |
| 21:56 | <AryehGregor> | (he said something like "the Linux ones are also terrible, but at least they're free") |
| 21:56 | <othermaciej> | however, we don't expect non-professional end users to necessarily meet the same standards we set for ourselves |
| 21:57 | <othermaciej> | hober: I guess Pages, Numbers and Keynote also all have HTML export |
| 21:57 | <AryehGregor> | I think the MediaWiki user interface itself has consistently appropriate alt text (although probably not 100% consistent since we have no formal review for this sort of thing). It's mainly the uploaded images that are the issue. |
| 21:57 | <AryehGregor> | By contrast, last time I looked at vBulletin's alt text, the interface also had bad alt text. |
| 21:58 | <AryehGregor> | (note: some of the interface on Wikipedia is built by local admin-supplied JavaScript, not MediaWiki, so it probably has worse alt text) |
| 22:01 | <othermaciej> | sadly apple.com doesn't validate (though one of those is just a bug and should totally be fixed in the markup) |
| 22:02 | <AryehGregor> | microsoft.com doesn't validate, but it comes pretty close. |
| 22:02 | <AryehGregor> | www.wikipedia.org validates as HTML5, because I fixed it so it would validate. :P |
| 22:04 | <AryehGregor> | Wait, <th> only accepts phrasing content children? Why? |
| 22:04 | <Hixie> | same reason <h1> does |
| 22:05 | <AryehGregor> | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ puts an <h2> as a child of a <th>. Isn't that potentially reasonable? |
| 22:05 | <AryehGregor> | Never mind the fact that it's in a layout table. |
| 22:05 | <AryehGregor> | I've seen articles where a large chunk of the article is a table, which has headings stuck in periodically to break it up. |
| 22:06 | <AryehGregor> | Seems like that's reasonable, if you don't want to break it into multiple tables (maybe it's logically one big table). |
| 22:11 | <TabAtkins> | I've *wanted* to do that before, when I had multiple tables which really wanted to all have the same size columns. I ended up just manually calculating a reasonable width and applying it directly. |
| 22:11 | <TabAtkins> | (It was for a pivot-table-like report, where you split up a single large table into several smaller tables based on one of the fields.) |
| 22:13 | <AryehGregor> | I can't remember where I saw it on Wikipedia. I think maybe it was one big table ordered by date and divided up by year or something. |
| 22:13 | <AryehGregor> | Maybe I'm imagining it. |
| 22:14 | <TabAtkins> | No, that sounds like a reasonably and believable case. |
| 22:14 | <AryehGregor> | The reason it came to mind is probably because I gave it repeatedly as a counterexample to users who wanted sections to be wrapped in their own <div> automatically (or in HTML5 terms, <section>, I guess). |
| 22:14 | <AryehGregor> | You can't do that automatically if headings can be nested in other elements, like tables. |
| 22:15 | <AryehGregor> | And MediaWiki doesn't use anything approaching a real HTML parser, so figuring out where it won't work is not so easy. |
| 22:25 | <AryehGregor> | Random observation: I maintain my synagogue's website. Somewhat else wrote it and it's totally not standards-compliant, but I don't have any reason to fix it. I would not bother checking existing content for correct alt text, which I'm sure it doesn't have, because there's only one person who goes to my synagogue regularly who's even close to blind, and he's well into his eighties and I'm almost sure he doesn't use computers, and anyway all |
| 22:25 | <AryehGregor> | of the info anyone has reason to care about (like the schedule) is text. |
| 22:26 | <AryehGregor> | Somehow I just cannot bring myself to view this as a situation where I have any moral or practical reason to care about the alt text quality. (Although I'd still write correct alt text for images I added myself, if practical.) |
| 22:26 | <AryehGregor> | (Just because, why not?) |
| 22:41 | <TabAtkins> | Because some of us are weird enough that theoretically grammatical purity matters. |
| 22:41 | <AryehGregor> | That sentence doesn't even conform to regular old grammatical purity. |
| 22:43 | <TabAtkins> | s/theoretically/theoretical/ |
| 22:44 | <AryehGregor> | That's better. |
| 22:44 | <AryehGregor> | I'm fine with theoretical grammatical purity as long as the person evaluating the purity actually knows what they're talking about. |
| 22:44 | <AryehGregor> | Meaning, like, a linguist, not an English major. |
| 22:44 | <AryehGregor> | English majors are totally clueless about grammar. |
| 22:45 | <AryehGregor> | Unfortunately, they don't realize this. |
| 22:45 | <TabAtkins> | I was talking about grammars of computer languages. |
| 22:45 | <AryehGregor> | Oh. |
| 22:45 | <TabAtkins> | But yes to what you said, too. |
| 22:46 | <AryehGregor> | I know bugger all about those. |
| 22:46 | <TabAtkins> | I mean like HTML. |
| 22:46 | <AryehGregor> | (although probably more than I know about theoretical grammatical purity of human languages) |
| 22:46 | <Hixie> | AryehGregor: what if a potential new recruit is blind and the lack of good alt text turns him away? |
| 22:47 | <AryehGregor> | Hixie, then I guess we lost someone. Good thing it's a totally hypothetical situation and I estimate the probability at being close enough to zero that it doesn't matter. |
| 22:47 | <AryehGregor> | I mean, you can come up with hypothetical scenarios for why anything could be bad. |
| 22:48 | <Hixie> | well as an aethist i certainly have no problem with that i guess :-P |
| 22:48 | <Hixie> | aetheist even |
| 22:48 | <Hixie> | atheist even |
| 22:48 | <AryehGregor> | Maybe a potential new recruit has a vicious and irrational hatred for blind people and refuses to use websites that have adequate alt text. |
| 22:48 | <Hixie> | jesus |
| 22:48 | <AryehGregor> | I like your choice of imprecation there. |
| 22:48 | <AryehGregor> | Very ironic in all directions. |
| 22:48 | <Hixie> | :-P |
| 22:51 | <AryehGregor> | Okay, does anyone know what's up with Bruce Schneier's Squid Blogging Fridays? |
| 22:51 | <AryehGregor> | Does he just like squid or something? |
| 22:51 | AryehGregor | almost capitalized "squid" out of reflex, since he's almost always talking about the HTTP proxy software instead of the sea-dwelling invertebrate when he uses the word |
| 22:52 | <TabAtkins> | Maybe he got it from PZ Myers? |
| 22:52 | <TabAtkins> | Hixie: aetheist: Someone who doesn't believe in the luminiferous aether. |
| 22:53 | <Hixie> | wait wait hold on, i just realised what AryehGregor said about his synagogue |
| 22:53 | <AryehGregor> | TabAtkins, that should be an aaetheist. |
| 22:53 | <Hixie> | AryehGregor: you'd rather have someone who has a vicious and irrational hatred for blind people than a blind person? :-P |
| 22:53 | <TabAtkins> | AryehGregor: If I wasn't trying for a pun, sure. |
| 22:53 | <AryehGregor> | An aetheist should be someone who *does* believe in the lumiferous aether. |
| 22:54 | <AryehGregor> | Hixie, no, but maybe my scenario is true and yours isn't. I mean, we're not going to turn away members just because they have a vicious and irrational hatred of blind people, are we? They can still pray here. |
| 22:54 | <Hixie> | AryehGregor: your synagogue, your rules. :-) |
| 22:54 | <Hixie> | AryehGregor: i know which i'd rather have in my community though :-) |
| 22:54 | <Hixie> | and it ain't the hater :-) |
| 22:55 | <AryehGregor> | But what if a blind-person-hater views the website, and no blind person does? Then we'd lose the blind-person-hater and gain nothing. |
| 22:55 | <AryehGregor> | I mean, my point was just that hypothetical scenarios are useless here unless you realistically evaluate their likelihood. |
| 22:56 | <AryehGregor> | You've got to weigh cost against benefit, not just demonstrate that there is some benefit in principle. |
| 22:56 | <AryehGregor> | Because there's also some cost, and you have to evaluate that too. |
| 22:57 | <AryehGregor> | (it should also be mentioned that my synagogue is tiny and dying, so the possibility of attracting any new members at all is kind of marginal) |
| 22:59 | <othermaciej> | AryehGregor: in the physical world, there are different standards of accommodation required for public facilities and large businesses vs. private facilities and small businesses |
| 22:59 | <othermaciej> | for example, if you build a multi-story apartment building, it must have an elevator; but it's not legally required that every private home has to have an elevator |
| 22:59 | <othermaciej> | or even a ramp, if it has front steps |
| 23:00 | <AryehGregor> | On the other hand, in web standards, no distinction is drawn, and all pages are required to have things like alt attributes. |
| 23:00 | <AryehGregor> | Which I don't necessarily object to as a policy measure. |
| 23:00 | <othermaciej> | I tend to think this logic should apply to the Web as well - Amazon is clearly a public accommodation just like a brick and mortar Barnes & Noble store, but a private person's photo blog is not |
| 23:00 | <AryehGregor> | But I have an issue with people who seem to assume that anything non-accessible is morally wrong. |
| 23:01 | <othermaciej> | but on the other hand, in the electronic world, the cost of accommodation is generally lower |
| 23:01 | <AryehGregor> | Even proportionally? |
| 23:01 | <AryehGregor> | It's much more expensive to build a ramp than to add alt text, but it's also much more expensive to build a building than to put up photos on Flickr. |
| 23:01 | <AryehGregor> | If you're uploading a bunch of photos from your camera without annotating them, adding alt text would actually be much more expensive than the act of uploading itself. |
| 23:02 | <AryehGregor> | Whereas I assume few to no physical accessibility measures come close in cost to the total cost of construction. |
| 23:03 | <AryehGregor> | (unless perhaps your building is grandfathered in and a legal obligation to provide accessibility is triggered by renovations, or something) |
| 23:03 | <othermaciej> | cost of private construction, at least in the US, is often dominated by one form or another of regulatory costs |
| 23:03 | <AryehGregor> | Yeah, but most of that is things like safety codes, not accessibility requirements. |
| 23:03 | <AryehGregor> | At least as far as I know (which is not very far). |
| 23:09 | <othermaciej> | building codes, and in some cases getting the needed permits |
| 23:52 | <Anon226> | Hi |
| 23:53 | <Anon226> | ... |
| 23:58 | <TabAtkins> | Damn, I actually spent a little bit of time finding a page that explained why you should just ask your question. |
| 23:59 | <TabAtkins> | And now the Anon's up and left. |