/irc-logs / freenode / #whatwg / 2008-08-25 / end

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# Session Start: Mon Aug 25 00:00:00 2008
# Session Ident: #whatwg
# [00:00] * Quits: hasather (n=hasather@90-231-107-133-no62.tbcn.telia.com) (Read error: 110 (Connection timed out))
# [00:06] <hsivonen> what's the deal with the new delicious.com wanting me to sign in again and again and putting autocomplete=off in the login fields?
# [00:06] <Hixie> zcorpan: yeah, it's a should on purpose. I'm sure somebody will find some case where it would be appropriate. :-)
# [00:06] <hsivonen> do they think they are a bank now?
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# [00:18] <hsivonen> This Week in HTML5 makes it on Robin Cover's radar: http://xml.coverpages.org/newsletter/news2008-08-22.html
# [00:19] <Hixie> sweet
# [00:19] <Hixie> go mark
# [00:20] <hsivonen> Google found it for me through a splog instead of the original source, though, so slogs are useful for something
# [00:21] <Hixie> hah
# [00:21] <Hixie> it would have found the real thing eventually
# [00:21] <Hixie> i think we need to do something to raise awareness of the way we're doing html5
# [00:21] <Hixie> - the openness
# [00:21] * Philip` thinks the XML Daily Newslink would be somewhat easier to read if it used paragraphs
# [00:21] <Hixie> - the history
# [00:22] <Hixie> - the non-consensus approach
# [00:22] <Hixie> i'm not sure how to get this awareness raised exactly
# [00:23] <Hixie> but several people have come to me recently with quite wrong preconceptions and then changed their attitude quite dramatically when i explained to them the history and so on
# [00:30] <webben> hsivonen: Have you tried following "Why does Delicious keep asking me to log in?" at http://delicious.com/help/faq ?
# [00:31] <webben> hsivonen: the inclusion of autocomplete is, hmm, curious to say the least
# [00:32] <webben> we don't have that on our main sign in boxes.
# [00:32] <jgraham> Hixie: What preconceptions did they have?
# [00:34] <Hixie> that it was a concensus-driven, closed working group that ignored the needs of users
# [00:38] <jgraham> Did they mainly associate HTML5 with WHATWG or W3C?
# [00:38] <Hixie> i don't think they really understood the difference
# [00:38] <Hixie> which makes sense
# [00:38] <Hixie> i'm not really worried about that per se
# [00:39] <jgraham> Interesting. I was wondering if they thought we were just another W3C working group or if they had independtly reached the wrong conclusions about WHATWG
# [00:40] <Hixie> good question
# [00:40] <Hixie> i don't know
# [00:42] <jgraham> (it should be noted that some people in the HTMLWG think we are a consensus driven group apt to ignore the needs of users...)
# [00:43] <gsnedders> My tongue hurts. I oughtn't bite it.
# [00:43] <jgraham> gsnedders: Literally?
# [00:43] <gsnedders> Literally.
# [00:44] <webben> yeah, eating yourself - not the best of ideas ;)
# [00:44] <Hixie> i bite my tongue literally all the time, hurts a bitch
# [00:45] <Hixie> and it inflates when you bite it, which just makes biting it more likely
# [00:45] <Hixie> it's terrible
# [00:45] <Hixie> jgraham: yeah, i'm not too worried about them. :-)
# [00:45] <jgraham> Hixie: They know :)
# [00:46] <gsnedders> Hixie: Exactly. I normally do it to the inside of my cheek, though, and not my tongue.
# [00:47] <jgraham> gsnedders: I take it this was accidentially biting it when you were aiming for food or something
# [00:47] <gsnedders> jgraham: Oh, probably just from thinking too hard
# [00:49] <Philip`> You can get various bitter-tasting liquids that you can put on your fingernails to stop yourself biting them; maybe you could put the same stuff on your tongue to stop you biting that
# [00:50] <Hixie> -_-
# [00:50] <gsnedders> Philip`: Tongue has tastebuds though, fingernails don't
# [00:51] <Philip`> Oh, darn
# [00:51] * gsnedders notes he can't wear any sort of toxic nail varnish, because he bites his nails too much (or at least, sort of sucks on the end of his fingers)
# [00:52] <gsnedders> (Yes, I did just make a reference to wearing nail varnish)
# [00:53] <gsnedders> And even if I put a bitter-tasting one on I still do it
# [00:53] * gsnedders is hopeless
# [00:54] <jgraham> gsnedders: You can wear toxic nail varnish in just the same way that everyone else can. It's just you're more likely to die the less-than-magnanimous death by nail-varnish poisoning
# [00:54] <gsnedders> jgraham: :)
# [00:55] <Philip`> Better than death by tea cosy
# [00:55] <Philip`> (Wikipedia reckons there's a 1 in 20 billion chance of that)
# [00:56] <gsnedders> Philip`: Link?
# [00:56] <gsnedders> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate ?
# [00:56] <gsnedders> No, that doesn't contain tea cosy
# [00:56] <Philip`> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_cosy
# [00:57] <gsnedders> One in twenty billion isn't bad.
# [00:57] <gsnedders> I think the probability of dying is higher than that.
# [00:58] <csarven> HMm.. Suicide is more likely then drowning
# [00:58] * gsnedders almost committed suicide by drowning
# [00:58] <csarven> *common
# [00:58] <gsnedders> Which means I could've counted towards both of those stats!
# [01:00] <BenMillard> jgraham, the "Deliverable for Action 72 @headers" got through my junk filters
# [01:01] <jgraham> BenMillard: What do I win?
# [01:01] <BenMillard> jgraham, me as an audience for your messages :)
# [01:02] <jgraham> gsnedders: I guess given some sort of afterlife it would have given you the oppertunity to have a party anecdote about things you had in common with Virgina Woolfe</macabre>
# [01:02] <jgraham> BenMillard: A fine prize indeed, I feel
# [01:03] <BenMillard> wewt
# [01:03] <BenMillard> your table inspector's highlighting seems to work more reliably than I remember from last year
# [01:04] <jgraham> BenMillard: Did you start using Firefox 3 in the interim? That might have made a difference, or I might have changed the code
# [01:04] <BenMillard> jgraham, still Firefox 2. changes to the code sounds likely
# [01:05] <BenMillard> jgraham, you wrote "I think the absolute simplest message that we can give authors is 'mark up your table headers as <th>'."
# [01:05] <jgraham> gsnedders: Although I should say that the rest of us are much happier with a gsendders without that particular anecdote :)
# [01:05] <BenMillard> jgraham I agree with that quote...think I said that at the November 2007 meeting
# [01:06] <BenMillard> there's a common misconception I come across, where accessibility is assumed to require complexity
# [01:07] <jgraham> BenMillard: You might well have done. It bothers me that a lot of accessibility types seem to have the idea that as long as there is some way to do something then that's good enough, even if it is really hard to use
# [01:07] <jgraham> (the first sentence referred to "said that in Nov. 2007)
# [01:08] <BenMillard> yeah, I gathered :)
# [01:08] <BenMillard> often the things they want to do aren't at all useful
# [01:08] <BenMillard> like creating associations between things that are right next to each other
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# [01:09] <Hixie> careful, you might lose your accessibility expert credentials if you keep saying sensible things like that :-)
# [01:09] <BenMillard> hixie, lol :P
# [01:11] <jgraham> BenMillard: That's why I keep suggesting that user testing is a stronger argument than theory.
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# [01:11] <BenMillard> jgraham, indeed
# [01:12] <BenMillard> I wonder if I have lost more than I've gained by ignoring Public-HTML for the past several months
# [01:12] <BenMillard> I've certainly gained a lot of time, with which I've done many fun and some productive things
# [01:14] <jgraham> BenMillard: It was pretty quiet for a bit. Then about a week or two ago it all kicked off again
# [01:15] <jgraham> Same topics, similar arguments
# [01:16] <BenMillard> since it all gets publically archived, I wonder if there's any gain in re-responding
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# [01:16] <Philip`> It gets archived but there's so much that nobody's ever going to actually read the archives
# [01:17] <Philip`> so clearly the solution is to keep reposting the better arguments, so that nobody will miss them
# [01:18] <jgraham> BenMillard: I guess the problem is xkcd syndrome http://xkcd.com/386/
# [01:19] <BenMillard> Philip`, alternatively, the people who decide HTML5's development probably saw and took on board the better points first time around, so repeating them doesn't change HTML5's direction very much?
# [01:20] <BenMillard> jgraham, perfect!
# [01:22] <Hixie> there are three main topics being discussed right now
# [01:22] <Hixie> img alt: i think i missed a couple of key things the first time (how the {} thing affects tool developers)
# [01:23] <Hixie> well, i guess the second time, not the first time
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# [01:23] <Hixie> so i don't know what i'll do with that, probably go back to just making alt="" be not given when you have no alt text
# [01:23] <Hixie> table headers: i haven't yet seen a clear description of the problem, but if there is a problem, then we'll have to address it
# [01:24] <Hixie> rdfa: i haven't managed to get ben to actually describe the problem yet
# [01:25] <BenMillard> Hixie, could you disambiguate when you talk about "Ben"? a couple of times I've seen you say that and it's put me into a state of panic since I don't remember that happenning :)
# [01:26] <webben> if "no alt text" means no precise equivalent, I think that would probably force me into non-conformance since I don't think that yields the best results for end-users.
# [01:27] <Hixie> oh sorry
# [01:27] <Hixie> i mean ben adida in this case
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# [01:29] <Hixie> webben: so what text would you suggest for the following cases? a generated image for a fractal explorer; the images in google maps in map view and satellite view; the street view images in google maps; an image uploaded as part of a batch upload with no information; a webcam
# [01:29] <webben> Hixie: I'm happier with a text description of those than no alt text.
# [01:29] <Hixie> in all of these cases, the software has no idea what the image is so can't describe it at all
# [01:29] <webben> Yes, a text equivalent is better, but I think a text description is better than zilch.
# [01:30] <webben> Hixie: alt="fractal" alt="uploaded photo"
# [01:30] <jgraham> Hixie: FWIW my guess is that there is a strong enough use case for people accessing the images out of the main flow that something like "fractal", "map tile", "street view", "photo", "webcam" would be better than nothing
# [01:31] <Hixie> webben: yeah see i don't agree that that is better, i think it's actually worse
# [01:31] <jgraham> but IANAATU
# [01:31] <Hixie> ATU?
# [01:31] <Hixie> AT user?
# [01:31] <jgraham> yes :)
# [01:31] <Hixie> woot
# [01:31] <Hixie> well that's what the {phoot} idea was for
# [01:31] <Hixie> {photo} even
# [01:32] <webben> well, i'd prefer being able to demark an alt as non-equivalent with an attribute, but i'd still include it.
# [01:32] <jgraham> My feeling is that in order of worst to best we have nothing, alt={photo}, no-text-equivalent alt="photo"
# [01:33] <jgraham> But I agree that all three suck for different reasons
# [01:33] <Hixie> i just don't see an attribute working for this
# [01:33] <Hixie> it has so many issues
# [01:34] <Hixie> i think the net misuse of a new attribute would make the total level fo accessibility lower
# [01:34] <BenMillard> I've seen gallery software use alt="Photo" as a default
# [01:34] <BenMillard> forums have "User posted image" or similar
# [01:34] <jgraham> I guess the fourth possibility is no attribute and no special syntax, just require the end user to work out if it is supposed to be a description or a text equivalent
# [01:35] <webben> Hixie: does the attribute have any use-cases other than for hypothetical future software?
# [01:35] <BenMillard> jgraham, yes, which is hardly much of a challenge in the cases I've seen
# [01:35] <webben> Hixie: e.g. do you expect a near-future version of Lynx to treat non-equivalents differently?
# [01:36] <webben> or was the idea that {} would force Lynx into treating them differently?
# [01:36] <jgraham> webben: I think in theory AT could only voice "image" if there is @n-t-e or {} and just read the alt text with no delimiter otherwise
# [01:37] * webben can't see why an AT would want to do that.
# [01:37] <jgraham> But in practice misuse of {} or an attribute might make that not work
# [01:37] <jgraham> webben: Want to do what?
# [01:37] <webben> 'voice "image" if there is @n-t-e or {} '
# [01:38] <webben> oh wait i see what you mean
# [01:38] <Philip`> jgraham: Misuse of alt="photo" (regardless of what the spec says) means that in practice AT can't just read the alt text with no delimiter
# [01:40] <jgraham> Philip`: I would expect that to be the case as well. So unless there is something I haven't thought of (likely) it seems just as well to say "sometimes @alt is a replacement, sometimes it is a description, work it out for yourselves"
# [01:40] <jgraham> (with rules like the current ones about when it should be a replacement and when a description)
# [01:41] <Hixie> the idea is that on an ideally written page, an <img> with alt="" can be completely substituted for its alt="" text, with no indication that an image was there
# [01:41] <jgraham> I guess it makes Henri's image checker less useful
# [01:41] <Hixie> but that these <img>s we're talking about would need to indicate that there is an image present
# [01:41] <Hixie> since that's the whole point
# [01:42] <Hixie> so we theoretically need a distinction
# [01:42] <Hixie> lack of alt="", {}, n-t-e, something
# [01:42] <jgraham> Hixie: The problem with designing for an ideally written page is that you're pretty much the only person who writes them :)
# [01:43] * webben isn't persuaded that would be an ideal page.
# [01:43] <jgraham> (although when I read feeds in thunderbird with images disabled, it is immensely irritating when people describe a picture rather than replace it either with "" or an actual equivalent)
# [01:44] <jgraham> webben: For whom? I think part of the issue might be that the text browser case is a bit different from the screenreader case
# [01:44] <webben> People like to communicate with images. Therefore being able to retrieve and share and bookmark etc images is an important use-case.
# [01:44] <webben> i want to be able to do that with a text browser, I think I'd want to be able to do that if I were a screen reader user too.
# [01:45] <jgraham> Hmm.
# [01:45] <Hixie> you don't want to bookmark most images
# [01:45] <Hixie> you probably don't even notice most images
# [01:45] * jgraham is going to bed now even though he hasn't managed to put a stop to wrongness on the internet :)
# [01:45] <Hixie> e.g. "RSS" is often an image
# [01:45] * webben never said most images.
# [01:45] <Hixie> sure
# [01:46] <Hixie> i'm just saying that it's an important use case but only for a small subset of images
# [01:46] <webben> although being able to grab that icon _is_ useful to people authoring content
# [01:47] <BenMillard> jgraham, it's good to break that habit
# [01:47] <BenMillard> as in, put your personal wellbeing ahead of timely responses to internet arguments
# [02:01] <webben> Hixie: being able to differentiate that subset (@role?) might be useful. but i think that would need to work as an authorial opt-in, since most people probably wouldn't bother and there's a huge body of existing content not making such a differentiation.
# [02:14] <Hixie> the problem with any attribute here is it'd be massively misused
# [02:15] <Hixie> much more so than a special syntax, based on what i've seen of web authoring practices so far
# [02:15] <Dashiva> It seems they're all tripping over each other in making @scope seem like a plague...
# [02:18] <webben> Hixie: not having to include alt will also be massively "misused".
# [02:18] <Hixie> it already is
# [02:18] <Hixie> i don't think this would make things worse
# [02:18] <webben> What's the reasoning for that?
# [02:18] <Hixie> if anything it might be a net benefit since we might reduce the amount of totally bogus alt text, which is arguably worse than no alt text in some cases
# [02:19] <webben> is there evidence that totally bogus alt text is a worse overall problem for users than no alt text?
# [02:20] <webben> and might that change if the "no alt text" group got higher?
# [02:20] <webben> *larger
# [02:21] <Hixie> "I then went on safari. blahblah The elephants were cool, but the tigers were the best: bdasflsjd" is not as good an experience as "I then went on safari. [IMAGE] The elephants were cool, but the tigers were the best: [IMAGE]"
# [02:22] <Hixie> (not that either is especially great, of course)
# [02:22] <webben> i'm not talking about the individual experience
# [02:22] <webben> i'm talking about which actually constitutes the bigger problem for end-users on the web now.
# [02:22] <Hixie> (I posit that the second one above is also better than "I then went on safari. elephants The elephants were cool, but the tigers were the best: tigers")
# [02:23] <webben> I posit "I then went on safari. image elephants The elephants were cool, but the tigers were the best: image tigers " is even better.
# [02:23] <Hixie> (I personally alsos think the [IMAGE] case, where "[IMAGE]" is something the UA shows in a different font/voice/color/whatever, is better than "I then went on safari. photo The elephants were cool, but the tigers were the best: photo")
# [02:24] <Hixie> i don't know of any reasearch into what problems blind users have experienced on the web so far
# [02:25] <Hixie> my own personal attempts at using screen readers have indicated that the screen readers themselves are a far bigger problem than anything the web pages do (based primarily on my experience with JAWS)
# [02:25] <webben> well it's not just blind users who suffer from no alt and bogus alt.
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# [02:26] <Hixie> text browser users suffer from it a lot too, but there aren't many of us (i use text browsers several times a week and alt="" isn't a big deal for me, though personally I would much rather people omit alt="" than give bogus or repeating alt"")
# [02:26] <BenMillard> search engines are also a UA which makes use of alt for the benefit of many users, for example, image searches
# [02:27] <Hixie> i work for a search engine
# [02:28] <Hixie> i assure you alt="" is the least of our worries
# [02:28] <Hixie> though if we were forced to comment on it, we'd much rather have no alt="" at all than have bogus alt=""
# [02:28] <Hixie> repetition isn't such a big deal for us though
# [02:29] <Hixie> since we can just filter out repeated text
# [02:29] <webben> also voice recognition users
# [02:29] <Hixie> voice recognition users?
# [02:29] <webben> *speech recognition, sorry
# [02:29] <Hixie> you mean for input? or do you mean speech synthesis?
# [02:29] <webben> input
# [02:30] <Hixie> i don't understand how alt="" affects input, can you elaborate?
# [02:30] <webben> images and icons that are controls mainly
# [02:30] <webben> e.g. an image of home, you say "home", the speech recognition looks for a link or button with "home" as a detectable text equivalent
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# [02:31] <webben> I think in practice they have to make a lot of use of title too; I dunno how they try to handle missing alt and title other than maybe link numbering.
# [02:32] <webben> Hixie: here's some actual HTML guidelines from a vendor: http://ct.scansoft.com/customerfiles/kbasefiles/3067/wp_DNS_HTML.pdf in case that's of interest
# [02:33] <Hixie> oh well for images that are controls the spec is clear that alt="" is required
# [02:33] <webben> I was going to ask. That's good at least.
# [02:33] <webben> that won't change if you make alt non-conforming?
# [02:34] <webben> what if you have a div with tabindex and onclick and an img inside it?
# [02:34] <Hixie> the only thing in http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/embedded0.html#alt that is likely to change is the tiny subsubsection labeled "Images whose contents are not known"
# [02:35] <webben> yeah, problem is it's not easy for a validator to distinguish those from other images.
# [02:35] * Hixie looks at the file above
# [02:35] <Hixie> oh well images are far from the biggest problem there
# [02:36] <Hixie> i mean, you have to use <h1> only for headers but how is the validator supposed to know?
# [02:37] <webben> Hixie: well, yes, it's a general problem with conformance testing. but in terms of trying to ensure control images have alt, it's potentially important
# [02:37] <webben> depends how you define control images in such a way that a checker could distinguish the two
# [02:38] <Hixie> i don't think we can
# [02:38] <Hixie> but we have this problem anyway distinguishing decorative elements from other elements
# [02:38] <webben> Hixie: can you define a subset of controls that can be checked?
# [02:38] <Hixie> well if you read the link i gave above you'll see one of the first things it does say though is that an image in a link that has no other text must have non-empty alt=""
# [02:39] <Hixie> which is probably all wecan do really
# [02:39] <Hixie> machine-checkability-wise, anyway
# [02:40] <Hixie> dragon's document seems in line with what the spec says today
# [02:40] <Hixie> doesn't really affect the problematic images we were talking about
# [02:40] <webben> also button and input type="image" and imagemap?
# [02:41] <Hixie> <input type=image> and <area> are dealt with separately and have separate requirements that basically always require non-empty alt=""
# [02:41] <webben> Hixie: I don't think it does affect the problematic images, no.
# [02:41] <webben> okay
# [02:41] <Hixie> (well <input> isn't in the spec yet but will be)
# [02:41] <webben> button?
# [02:41] <Hixie> what about it?
# [02:41] <webben> shouldn't the spec mention button along with link at the above url?
# [02:41] <Hixie> oooh, good call
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# [03:05] <Hixie> webben: spec updated
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# [06:22] <takkaria> urgh, 521 new mails
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# [09:18] <Hixie> what does the "@" mean in "-rw-r--r--@"?
# [09:20] <hsivonen> Hixie: ACL I think
# [09:21] <Hixie> any idea how i view the acl info?
# [09:22] <Hixie> ls -e didn't work
# [09:23] <jacobolus> Hixie: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10-4.ars/8
# [09:23] <jacobolus> really, -e didn't work?
# [09:23] <jacobolus> hrm
# [09:23] <Hixie> that suggests @ does not mean acl
# [09:23] <Hixie> since no @ appears in their listings
# [09:23] <jacobolus> indeed
# [09:23] <hsivonen> Hixie: I can't remember and Googling gives me the article jacobolus mentioned
# [09:23] <Hixie> maybe it means there's fork data or something
# [09:24] <Hixie> or attributes
# [09:24] <hsivonen> I might misremember the meaning of @
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# [09:25] <jacobolus> Hixie: If the file or directory has extended attributes, the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by a '@' character.
# [09:26] <hsivonen> xattr --list file
# [09:26] <jacobolus> so actually the page you want is http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10-4.ars/7 :)
# [09:26] <Hixie> yeah i was just playing with mdls which also seems to list attributes
# [09:27] <Hixie> ok anyway
# [09:27] <Hixie> it is an attributes thing
# [09:28] <jacobolus> no, mdls lists info from the spotlight store
# [09:28] <jacobolus> which is different from xattrs
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# [09:29] <hsivonen> are ACLs a special case of attributes?
# [09:29] <jacobolus> and it is *very very* frustrating that setting custom xattrs can’t put custom metadata in spotlight :(
# [09:29] <jacobolus> hsivonen: yes, ACLs are stored in xattrs
# [09:29] <hsivonen> ok. so my memory isn't totally broken
# [09:30] <Hixie> man mac is confusing :-P
# [09:31] <jacobolus> hsivonen: I'm not sure you can get to them though through normal xattr APIs
# [09:32] * Hixie sighs loudly
# [09:33] <Hixie> i wish i had some data to go on with this <img> thing
# [09:33] <Hixie> i really have no idea what to do
# [09:33] <Hixie> which is a pretty ridiculous position to be in given the rarity with which this will affect users
# [09:33] <Hixie> (it's not like blind users surf to flickr often)
# [09:34] <jacobolus> why do you have no idea what to do?
# [09:34] <jacobolus> I thought it was figured out
# [09:34] <jacobolus> with the {}'s etc.
# [09:34] <Hixie> people have raised a valid concern with the {}
# [09:35] <Hixie> which is that it increases the effort of people trying to write accessible content
# [09:35] <hsivonen> Hixie: do you have data on how often people with text input difficulties execise their right to speech by publishing photos?
# [09:35] <jacobolus> increases the effort?
# [09:35] <jacobolus> as in, it's too hard to put {…} in?
# [09:35] <Hixie> because they now have to work around cases where the alt="" might end up containing {} through no fault of their own, e.g. if the alt is user input
# [09:36] <tantek> what's wrong with {} ?
# [09:36] <Hixie> hsivonen: 100% of my sample of 1 has done it
# [09:36] <jacobolus> that seems like a vanishingly unlikely edge case
# [09:36] <jacobolus> what naïve user is going to make the whole alt name start w/ { and end w/ }?
# [09:37] <Hixie> jacobolus: yeah but the people who care about accessibility (the group we want to piss off the least) will want to do the right thing in all cases anyway, so it will disproportionately hurt them
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# [09:38] <hsivonen> tantek: if you give the user a text field for writing alt text, your program needs to do something when the value entered into the field starts with { and ends with }, since just passing that through would leak user input into writing the wrong meaning into the file format
# [09:38] <jacobolus> Hixie: so “do the right thing” here will be interpreted as what? strip out the {} if users add them?
# [09:38] <Hixie> jacobolus: or add a space or something
# [09:38] <jacobolus> bleh
# [09:38] <jacobolus> Hixie: it strikes me that it's still easier to “do the right thing” under the {} system than currently
# [09:38] <tantek> why would { } be the wrong meaning?
# [09:39] <jacobolus> e.g. what if a user types nothing in the box?
# [09:39] <tantek> what if the img was a picture of some curly braces?
# [09:39] <Hixie> tantek: {...} has special meaning according to html5 right now (will likely change)
# [09:39] <Hixie> jacobolus: like i said, i've no idea what to do
# [09:39] <tantek> then escape it
# [09:40] <tantek> & has special meaning hence &
# [09:40] <tantek> not sure what the big deal is
# [09:40] <hsivonen> tantek: right, so escaping means more data munging cases to handle than putting the flag out of band into a separate attribute
# [09:40] <Hixie> tantek: there's no defined escaping mechanism for this right now, but even if there was, the big deal is that we are making life harder for the only group who are doing the right thing, which is staggeringly bad language design
# [09:40] <jacobolus> so what's the alternate proposal?
# [09:40] <jacobolus> make up a new attribute?
# [09:41] <Hixie> i have 23 alternative proposals on my list right now
# [09:41] <Hixie> they all suck in one way or another
# [09:41] <jacobolus> eep
# [09:41] <jacobolus> how many with any realistic chances?
# [09:41] <Hixie> 0
# [09:42] <tantek> what is the URL that documents the need for this { } feature?
# [09:42] <jacobolus> tantek: whatwg.com/html5
# [09:42] <Hixie> whatwg.org
# [09:42] <jacobolus> erm, org
# [09:42] <Hixie> but the spec doesn't document the need
# [09:43] <tantek> the use case, the background, the group/people that asked for it etc.
# [09:43] <Hixie> tantek: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Aug/0602.html documents some of it
# [09:43] <Hixie> search for {...}
# [09:43] <Hixie> er
# [09:43] <Hixie> actually
# [09:43] <tantek> similar problem exists today if someone exj�8s < or " or > into user input meant for an alt attribute right?
# [09:43] <Hixie> search for "the tentative decision"
# [09:43] <Hixie> no, we have a defined escaping for that and it is wildly implemented already
# [09:44] <hsivonen> I really need to get to the bottom of 4 concurrent validations of up to 1 MB pages exhausting 1 GB of RAM
# [09:44] <hsivonen> there has to be some silly data structure growth somewhere
# [09:44] <hsivonen> and some crazy markup out there on the Web
# [09:44] <Hixie> jacobolus: http://damowmow.com/temp/alt lists the proposals so far
# [09:45] <Hixie> hsivonen: how is the 1,000,000 validations plan going?
# [09:45] <hsivonen> Hixie: I was able to download 93% of the pages successfully. validating them now
# [09:45] <hsivonen> Hixie: it seems that either the parser or the validator has a memory leak
# [09:45] <Hixie> ah
# [09:45] <hsivonen> (I'm reusing the parser and validator objects)
# [09:46] <jacobolus> Hixie: just go for B.1
# [09:46] <hsivonen> the dmoz validation run hung for unknown reasons
# [09:46] <Hixie> jacobolus: disallowing flickr is not a workable solution
# [09:47] <jacobolus> (joke)
# [09:49] <Hixie> oh many people think B.1 is a good solution
# [09:49] <jacobolus> many people are nutgs
# [09:49] <hsivonen> Hixie: oh, and real Web content has made a couple of assertions to fire
# [09:49] <jacobolus> or nuts even
# [09:49] <hsivonen> which is interesting
# [09:49] <Hixie> real web content is insane
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# [09:50] <hsivonen> also, Japanese Web content exposed a bug in my charset decoder driver code that I hadn't seen with UTF-8 content
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# [09:54] <jacobolus> Hixie: what would the practical effect be if a website allowed user input and the user put in “{picture of grandma on her 80th birthday}” or whatever?
# [09:54] <jacobolus> i.e. what would a screen reader do with that content
# [09:55] <Hixie> well that would actually be correct alternative text for that image
# [09:55] <Hixie> it would cause the UA to attract attention to the fact that there is an image with the caption "picture of..."
# [09:55] <jacobolus> that is, if the {} proposal goes through
# [09:56] <jacobolus> how is {foo} treated differently from foo
# [09:56] <Hixie> right that 's what i was assuming
# [09:56] <Hixie> {foo} causes the UA to attract attention to the fact that there is an image
# [09:56] <Hixie> foo causes the UA to say "foo" without mentioning the image
# [09:56] <jacobolus> I see
# [09:56] <jacobolus> that seems like pretty minimal harm then from the vanishingly unlikely false positives
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# [09:57] <Lachy> Hixie, that doesn't match what existing screen readers doo with the "foo" case. They do say "image: foo"
# [09:57] <virtuelv> JohnResig: yt?
# [09:57] <Hixie> existing screen readers fail long before they get around to rendering any html
# [09:57] <Hixie> jacobolus: i agree
# [09:57] <Hixie> jacobolus: won't stop the people who care from being even more careful though
# [09:57] <jacobolus> I mean, {} aren’t even meaningful characters in english
# [09:58] <tantek> FWIW - as someone who prefers not to see new syntax, capturing such an annotation in another attribute seems preferable to overloading *both* an existing attribute and the use of characters which could mean something themselves.
# [09:58] <Lachy> sure, but in the "foo" case, why should they stop notifying the user that there's an image there?
# [09:58] <jacobolus> maybe someone will accidentally put them in a description of a mathematical formula or something
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# [09:59] <Hixie> tantek: another attribute doesn't work because the abuse such an attribute would get would almost certainly cause more damage than the little benefit it would cause
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# [09:59] <Hixie> tantek: we've already seen that authors are completely incapable of reliably making use of attributes like alt="" or longdesc=""
# [09:59] <Hixie> tantek: and this would be an even more subtle attribute
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# [10:00] <Hixie> Lachy: the whole point of alt="" is that it is replacement text that removes mention of the image
# [10:00] <jacobolus> virtuelv: isn't it 4 AM in EDT?
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# [10:00] <virtuelv> jacobolus: probably
# [10:00] <virtuelv> I'll have to catch up when I get to Turin this afternoon then
# [10:00] <Hixie> jacobolus: the original complaint re alt={} was latex, fwiw, which could quite legitimately end up with {}
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# [10:01] <virtuelv> I'm a bit puzzled about one thing he's doing with Sizzle
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# [10:01] <jacobolus> how does it legitimately end w/ {} ??
# [10:02] <Hixie> i mean {somethingsomething}
# [10:02] <jacobolus> Hixie: you just mean that's what latex → html converters do currently?
# [10:02] <Hixie> yes
# [10:02] <jacobolus> probably one particular latex → html converter, which could be trivially changed
# [10:04] <tantek> Hixie, your point that the cognitive/incentive barrier to usage of such an attribute makes it useless is a good one, and justifies not only not introducing such an effectively useless attribute, but any such equivalent mechanism, *especially* one that introduces additional syntax.
# [10:05] <Hixie> tantek: agreed
# [10:06] <Hixie> tantek: so that suggests making alt="" optional for this case, but then we have no way to orient speech synthesis users when they navigate image-by-image
# [10:06] <tantek> the lack of a mechanism does not rationally justify introducing an ineffective mechanism
# [10:06] <Hixie> tantek: agreed
# [10:07] <Hixie> tantek: however the aforementioned case is important enough to certain authors that at least one has said they will always include some alternative text, even if it is not suitable for linear navigation (i.e. reading the page straight through)
# [10:08] <tantek> do they do so now on existing pages?
# [10:08] <Hixie> those do yeah
# [10:08] <Hixie> it makes those pages harder to read if you have images disabled though, e.g. in a text browser
# [10:08] <Hixie> which is bad
# [10:08] <Hixie> and so not really what we want to require
# [10:09] <hsivonen> those authors have *way* fewer photos in their photostream than tantek
# [10:09] <Hixie> yup
# [10:10] <tantek> below what author/content/sample size threshold do you reach the point of diminishing returns of language design improvements/features?
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# [10:12] <Hixie> tantek: oh we're way below that already
# [10:13] <Hixie> tantek: but i still have to say _something_
# [10:13] <hsivonen> Hixie: it seems to me, though, that part of the problem is that you want the result to make sense in Lynx instead of sacrificing Lynx and focusing solely on the AT case
# [10:15] <Hixie> as a regular lynx user, i don't think it's unreasonable to have things make sense in lynx
# [10:15] <Hixie> it's also a matter of it making sense in graphical browsers with images disabled
# [10:16] <hsivonen> Hixie: that means you are letting non-accessibility issues get in the way of accessibility issues
# [10:16] <Hixie> this isn't an accessibility issue
# [10:16] <Hixie> it's an html issue
# [10:17] <hsivonen> right :-)
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# [10:18] <hsivonen> however, the accessibility alt-need conditions aren't curable. the need to turn off images in a graphical browser is curable (by flat-rate 3G/EDGE mobile subscriptions)
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# [10:19] <Hixie> yeah well it might be curable in theory, but many parts of africa aren't getting 3G in the next ten years
# [10:19] <Hixie> and hell, many parts of america don't have decent EDGE
# [10:19] <tantek> another case for alt text being readable is the very common occurrence of web based mail interfaces (e.g. Gmail) presenting HTML email with image loading disabled for security/privacy reasons.
# [10:20] <Hixie> hsivonen: and frankly, it's only a problem for AT users when they navigate image-by-image
# [10:20] <hsivonen> Hixie: the experts say that's the usual mode of operation
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# [10:21] <Hixie> hsivonen: sure, so we have to handle it
# [10:21] <hsivonen> Hixie: after all, VO, for one, doesn't even have sane UI for reading content in a continuous manner
# [10:21] <tantek> hsivonen, the usual mode of operation of web based email interfaces is image loading disabled.
# [10:21] <Hixie> anyway
# [10:22] <hsivonen> (I'd use VO for non-accessibility things if it had a "read on from here" command)
# [10:22] <Hixie> no. idead. what. to. do.
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# [10:22] <Hixie> hsivonen: just select a bunch of text and use the speech service
# [10:22] <tantek> thus the Lynx / graphical browsers with images disabled case is far more common than those two specific use cases might imply
# [10:23] <Hixie> doesn't really matter how common all these cases are, they're all common enough that we have to deal with them
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# [10:28] <hsivonen> it seems to me that the headers/id discussion and the RDFa discussion revolve around a similar issue (except headers/id has more UA legacy than RDFa)
# [10:29] <Hixie> they certainly have in common that i don't understand the problems they are trying to solve
# [10:29] <hsivonen> that is, if we consider something like "simple things should be easy and complex things should be possible", there's one faction that is willing to make simple cases less easy in order to support complex cases with the same model and another faction that mainly cares about making simple case easy and is willing to cut support for some complex cases
# [10:30] <annevk2> hsivonen, turning images off is also common in e.g. Russia
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# [10:31] <annevk> as bandwidth is ridiculously expensive there still
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# [10:32] <hsivonen> Hixie: I *think* I understand the problems RDFa is supposed to solve. In the case of ccREL, I just think that some of the problems are non-problem and some problem won't be successfully solved by the proposed solution
# [10:32] <hsivonen> Hixie: also, I don't think that the generic problem RDFa solves is a problem whose solutions yield good markup
# [10:33] <Hixie> hsivonen: i'm hoping ben adida can actually explain the problem
# [10:34] <Hixie> i can come up with problems that i think maybe they are solving
# [10:34] <hsivonen> I think RDFa proponents aren't doing their cause any favors when their conference slides take well-known microformats and then show how it can by done "right" with RDFa
# [10:34] <hsivonen> and the RDFa version is always more verbose
# [10:34] <hsivonen> i.e. crufty
# [10:34] <annevk> yeah, that's funny
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# [10:36] <Hixie> can anyone find the link to joshue's usability videos?
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# [10:36] <tantek> crufty, more verbose markup examples are nearly always promoted by those who don't actually write markup (publish content on the web) for a living, nor talk with those who do so on a daily basis.
# [10:36] <Hixie> i searched youtube but can't figure out the right terms
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# [10:36] <Hixie> i know they're on youtube somewhere
# [10:38] <annevk> does "HTML5 WG header/id test" help?
# [10:39] <annevk> it should anyway, http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=HTML5+WG+header%2Fid+test
# [10:39] <hsivonen> also, I have non-techincal reasons why I don't like some aspects of ccREL
# [10:40] <hsivonen> the "extensibility" afforded by "requires"/"permits" is effectively catering for license proliferation
# [10:41] <Hixie> yeah i'm not a big fan of CC's work to be honest
# [10:41] <hsivonen> and in the public licensing space, CC is responsible for more license proliferation than any other single organization
# [10:41] <Hixie> they made some interesting licenses, but then they kept on doing things and i'm not sure i like it
# [10:41] <Hixie> yeah
# [10:42] <hsivonen> Hixie: I like CC-by, CC-by-sa and perhaps CC-by-nc-nd
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# [10:42] * Hixie notes he works for a group that has done a lot of work to reduce license proliferation in software
# [10:42] <Hixie> hsivonen: which is nd again?
# [10:42] <tantek> I like the cc-pd and CC0 work
# [10:42] <Hixie> annevk: yes, thanks
# [10:42] <Hixie> annevk: perfect
# [10:42] <hsivonen> Hixie: I seriously dislike it when they promote CC-by-nc and CC-by-nc-sa under the same brand as the Free licenses
# [10:43] <hsivonen> Hixie: no derivatives
# [10:43] * hsivonen looks up CC0
# [10:43] * annevk used Google to figure out the right text then submitted that to Youtube for the rest
# [10:44] * hsivonen makes a mental note to refer Europeans to CC0 instead of cc-pd
# [10:44] <hsivonen> tantek: thanks
# [10:44] <Hixie> annevk: :-)
# [10:44] <tantek> by headers/id do you mean the td attributes?
# [10:45] <hsivonen> tantek: yes
# [10:45] <tantek> there has been more and more use of those in hCalendar microformatted conference schedules
# [10:45] <tantek> e.g.
# [10:45] <tantek> http://adactio.com/extras/schedules/web2expo-berlin/
# [10:46] <hsivonen> I really want CC-by and CC-by-sa to succeed. I've even donated some money to CC, but I really wish they didn't confuse things with NonCommercial and RDF
# [10:47] <tantek> a few more Jeremy has created here: http://adactio.com/extras/schedules/
# [10:47] <Hixie> man i wish i could find some video of blind users just browsing the web
# [10:48] <hsivonen> tantek: it really sucks if authors need to take steps like that to make stuff work with the current state of AT
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# [10:50] <tantek> actually, the use of headers and id in those examples is not for AT (not directly anyway) but rather to better markup the data in an extractable way with minimal duplication of data
# [10:50] <tantek> it turned out that headers/id was designed well enough for this use
# [10:50] <tantek> and incidentally, AT benefits result
# [10:50] <hsivonen> jgraham: the table inspector crashes with the berlin URL above
# [10:51] <hsivonen> tantek: shouldn't data extractors and AT implement the HTML5 header cell association algorithm?
# [10:51] <tantek> hsivonen, indeed (to your previous remarks re ccRel). note there are also incrementally advanced license microformat efforts underway: http://microformats.org/wiki/licensing
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# [10:53] <hsivonen> tantek: interesting to see that the microformats community is on the case.
# [10:54] <hsivonen> tantek: Ben Adida on the WHATWG list said the microformats folks turned them down
# [10:54] <tantek> slowly and steadily, but there have been more and more folks interested in incrementally taking steps beyond rel-license, but much more practical than ccRel/RDFa
# [10:54] <hsivonen> tantek: did you just turn down some of the more theoretical parts of ccREL?
# [10:55] <tantek> microformats folks turned down assumptions that namespaces are necessary etc.
# [10:55] <tantek> and asked for research to be done on content/license use in the wild on the web to document use cases
# [10:55] <tantek> theoretical proposals are rejected as a matter of course in the microformats community
# [10:56] <Hixie> heh
# [10:56] <Hixie> i just requested the same thing :-)
# [10:56] <Hixie> and henri rejected the namespaces :-)
# [10:56] <Hixie> glad to see we're on the same ball :-)
# [10:56] <hsivonen> tantek: that's amusing considering how Hixie and I responded on the WHATWG list
# [10:57] <tantek> and I do not read the WHATWG list, except when it turns up in search result while doing research.
# [10:57] <tantek> (or when given specific URLs to read)
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# [10:58] <tantek> Hixie, hsivonen, perhaps the subspace neural link is functioning at a subconcious level :)
# [11:02] <tantek> speaking of namespaces, I added more documentation citing WHATWG logs and quoting hsivonen and othermaciej to the microformats namespaces page: http://microformats.org/wiki/namespaces
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# [11:11] <tantek> speaking of which, I noticed that the WHATWG IRC logs are on a server that apparently keeps logs of other channels as well http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/
# [11:11] <hsivonen> webben: thanks. I had had special cookie settings for del.icio.us.
# [11:11] <tantek> the server/machine that was keeping #microformats logs is down and will take some time fix unfortunately. would it be possible to get #microformats added to the list of channels logged at http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/ ?
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# [11:11] <hsivonen> krijnh: ^
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# [11:13] <hsivonen> tantek: thanks for considering my remarks quotable.
# [11:13] <hsivonen> tantek: this guy was in charge of MSXML and starts with "If there is any one of the W3C's family of XML specifications, that has caused me the most grief, XML Namespaces is probably it.": http://nothing-more.blogspot.com/2004/10/loving-and-hating-xml-namespaces_21.html
# [11:14] <tantek> wow
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# [11:24] <hsivonen> the distinction between xml:lang parsing into {}xml:lang or {http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace}lang depending on content type is already confusing people...
# [11:25] <hsivonen> I already suppressed a technically correct but confusing validator warning in this area...
# [11:27] <zcorpan> hsivonen: what was the warning?
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# [11:28] <zcorpan> hsivonen: that xml:lang isn't serializable as xml?
# [11:28] <hsivonen> zcorpan: that one
# [11:28] <zcorpan> ok
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# [11:29] <zcorpan> hsivonen: did you get emails about that? or why did you remove it?
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# [11:31] <hsivonen> zcorpan: I got an email
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# [11:55] <hsivonen> some day I should grab certain Java 1.0 classes from Harmony, put them in a different package, remove synchronization and make Jing use the unsynchronized versions instead
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# [12:39] <Hixie> how about this
# [12:40] <Hixie> we just say that if an image has no alt text, then it must have at least one of the following, and the first of the following that it has must have enough information about hte image to help orient the user if he is navigating by image (and have the ATs read out the relevant information):
# [12:40] <Hixie> - title="" attribute on the <img> itself
# [12:40] <Hixie> - <legend> of the <figure> that contains the <img>
# [12:40] <Hixie> - heading of the section that contains the <img>
# [12:54] * Lachy notes that he suggested something like that a long time ago
# [12:55] <webben> Hixie: Existing software isn't going to make any use of legend or heading, but requiring title where alt is absent _might_ be a viable approach (in backwards compatibility terms). One would need to check exactly what existing software does.
# [12:55] <Lachy> except for the heading of the section one
# [12:55] <webben> e.g. I think some screen readers will read title where there is no alt.
# [12:55] <webben> I don't know if, when you disable images in your browser, you see title if there is no alt though.
# [12:56] <Hixie> just saying "image" is good enough for legacy handling
# [12:56] <Hixie> i mean it's not what we want long term
# [12:56] <Hixie> but we shouldn't constrain ourselves to only what today's ATs do
# [12:56] <Hixie> especially given how horrifically bad today's ATs are
# [12:56] <webben> Is saying "image" what they all do.
# [12:57] * webben again maintains today's AT is little worse than today's other UAs, but they're both what the spec needs to work iwth.
# [12:57] <Hixie> in the case of JAWS, there's about 212 configuration options that control what it does
# [12:57] <Lachy> I don't like allowing alt to be omitted just when the section has a heading because there's no way to distinguish between when the image is the primary content of the section, or if it's just a minor part of a larger section
# [12:57] <Hixie> ATs today are far, far worse usability wise than today's browsers
# [12:57] <Hixie> i mean there's not even a comparison
# [12:57] <webben> I know that's your opinion. I just don't think the differences are as radical as you do.
# [12:57] <Hixie> it's like comparing the usability of CP/M with the usability of Mac OS X
# [12:58] <webben> I also don't think it matters, just like it doesn't really matter how bad I think IE is.
# [12:58] <webben> it still needs to be taken into account
# [12:58] <Hixie> Lachy: if it's a minor part, then it can't have alt omitted anyway. you can only omit it for key content.
# [12:58] <Hixie> webben: like i said, i think saying "image" is good enough
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# [12:59] <Hixie> webben: saying the title is even better
# [12:59] <Lachy> Hixie, no, that's not what I meant.
# [12:59] <Hixie> Lachy: do you have a page that shows an example of an img where alt="" could legitimately be omitted without the section header being useful?
# [12:59] <Hixie> and where it would have neither title="" nor <figure>?
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# [13:00] <Lachy> Hixie, no. You seem to have misunderstood me.
# [13:00] <Hixie> possibly :-)
# [13:01] <Lachy> there are 2 cases that I think need to be distinguished:
# [13:01] <webben> Hixie: Could one require describedby attributes explicitly linking the image to the heading?
# [13:01] <Lachy> 1. The flickr case where there's an image and the section heading relates directly to that image, much like a caption.
# [13:02] <Hixie> webben: wouldn't that be redundant?
# [13:02] <webben> Hixie: You mean if the image was the sole content of the section?
# [13:02] <Lachy> In that case, alt could be omitted according to the rule "heading of the section that contains the <img>"
# [13:02] <webben> Hixie: Probably not, given the variety of existing web content.
# [13:02] <Hixie> webben: well there's only one section that could possibly be the most relevant one to the image, and that's the header of hte section the image is in
# [13:02] <webben> Hixie: Which won't be using HTML5 header semantics.
# [13:03] <Hixie> webben: ?
# [13:03] <webben> Hixie: With real-world content that's dubious. But in any case being relevant to the header is not the same thing as the header titling the image.
# [13:03] <Lachy> 2. The case where the image isn't the primary content of the section, but just a small part of it. e.g. <section><h1>Foo</h1><p>some paragraphs...<p>something about this image <img ...><p>more paragraphs</section>
# [13:03] <webben> Hixie: Existing content won't be using HTML5 header semantics.
# [13:04] <Hixie> Lachy: when would that image ever legitimately not have alt text?
# [13:04] <Lachy> in that case, the image should have an alt="whatever" because it's a key part of the content. But there's no way to distinguish that from case #1
# [13:04] <Hixie> webben: why not?
# [13:04] <Hixie> Lachy: oh well sure, we can't distinguish bogus alt="" text from correct alt="" text either
# [13:04] <Hixie> Lachy: we're talking about what's conforming here
# [13:04] <webben> Hixie: Because HTML5 clarifies and reinvents HTML4's ambiguous header semantics, which were close to dead-letter in the real world.
# [13:05] <Lachy> yeah, but the conformance rules you gave above are ambiguous about it
# [13:05] <Hixie> Lachy: do you mean doc conformance or ua confomance?
# [13:05] <Lachy> doc conformance
# [13:05] <Hixie> webben: so? the html5 rules are based on what pages do
# [13:05] <Hixie> Lachy: i don't understand what's ambiguous
# [13:05] <webben> Hixie: yes but the conformance rules need to encourage content that AT can actually use, which means helping it distinguish between different scenarios.
# [13:06] <Hixie> webben: we can never help ATs distinguish between correct and incorrect cases
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# [13:06] <webben> of course you can.
# [13:06] <Hixie> webben: there are plenty of images with wrong alt="" text
# [13:06] <webben> yes, that's a particular case you'd struggle to help with
# [13:06] <webben> in this case, one clearly could help
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# [13:07] <Hixie> webben: there are no cases where authors wouldn't mis-use whatever indicator of conformance we came up with
# [13:07] <webben> er ... obviously.
# [13:07] <Hixie> well then
# [13:07] <webben> authors will make mistakes. with everything. and the spec can't help.
# [13:07] <Lachy> Hixie, because your proposed conformance rules stated: "we just say that if an image has no alt text, then it must have [a] heading of the section that contains the <img>". Both cases #1 and #2 I gave fit that condition, even though #2 isn't supposed to be a legitimate case.
# [13:08] <webben> guess we don't need a spec?
# [13:08] <Hixie> webben: ??
# [13:08] <webben> Hixie: Saying including a feature because some authors will misuse it doesn't make any sense to me.
# [13:08] <Hixie> Lachy: the actual rule would say that the heading has to be the caption of the image or some such
# [13:09] <Lachy> ok, that makes it less ambiguous
# [13:09] <webben> Hixie: You'd need to make a case that it would be misused in enough high-profile cases that a UA would be forced to ignore the feature.
# [13:09] <Hixie> webben: you are saying that we shouldn't do what i proposed because pages that aren't conforming would fail on this case, right? but isn't that always goign to be the case?
# [13:09] <webben> Hixie: Not sure that is what I'm saying.
# [13:10] <Hixie> webben: what are you saying then?
# [13:10] <webben> Hixie: I'm saying that additional markup would help UAs differentiate between a (assumed) common class of non-conformance and a (my guess) rarer class of non-conformance.
# [13:11] <webben> hmm or rather class of conformance
# [13:11] <webben> that is distinguish between image amongst other content which is not labelled by the heading but is missing alt (common failure)
# [13:12] <webben> and image amongst other content which is labelled by the heading and is missing alt (this would be easy for Flickr to implement, for example)
# [13:12] <webben> of course, authors might misuse _all_ the features involved.
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# [13:13] <Hixie> seems to me that you would be be obtaining this distinction only by increasing the number of cases that were non-conforming in other ways
# [13:13] <Hixie> e.g. <img> with alt and said to be described by somehting else, or <img> said to be described by something that isn't there, etc
# [13:14] <Hixie> <img> said to be described by something that it isn't described by
# [13:14] <webben> I think only the last one is a substantial problem.
# [13:15] <webben> the middle case can be trivially caught in validation
# [13:15] <webben> and in practice I think the last one isn't going to have a big impact
# [13:15] <webben> again, this is markup that's trivial for Flickr to implement
# [13:15] <Hixie> i also don't want to introduce an attribute for this one case, and i don't want to rely on aria at this point
# [13:15] <webben> and that's the big use case here.
# [13:16] <webben> Hixie: I think trying to solve these problems without features is ambitious.
# [13:16] <Hixie> i'd rather not solve the problem at all than introduce a new attribute
# [13:16] <Hixie> attributes are expensive and this is not a case important enough to warrant that level of investment
# [13:17] <webben> Yes, that's not a position that makes sense to me.
# [13:18] <webben> In practice, UAs/AT have to try and solve these problems whether there are features for them or not.
# [13:18] <Hixie> anyway, even in the case of incorrectly-non-alt'ed images that have no title=, reading the local section title when the user navigates by image to that image isn't a big deal, it still orients the user
# [13:18] <webben> and that leads to non-interoperability
# [13:18] <Hixie> and we can say that there must only be one such img in that section, to catch errors of that nature
# [13:19] <webben> Hixie: it only orients the user if you say something like "in section {Section title}"
# [13:19] <webben> otherwise it misleads the user
# [13:19] <Hixie> right
# [13:20] <webben> it also sucks for extraction, since you can't easily map the section title into metadata about the image.
# [13:20] <webben> whereas if you knew that something was intended as a title field, you could dump it into a title field
# [13:21] <Hixie> that's not a use case i've previously been worrying about
# [13:21] <Hixie> doesn't seem like something users are going to need particularly
# [13:21] <Hixie> i mean, when i see someone save an image, they don't save any metadata with it today
# [13:21] <Hixie> why would they start?
# [13:21] <webben> Hixie: I give what I save titles.
# [13:22] <webben> it would be a nice-to-have if it were prepopulated with a sane title.
# [13:22] <Lachy> Hixie, given this markup: <section><h1>My Cat</h1><img src="cat.jpg"></section>, what should a screen reader say?
# [13:22] <webben> whether in the filename or other metadata that could be found by beagle/spotlight etc.
# [13:22] <hsivonen> Hixie: how would you get a reasonable section heading when the user supplies only bitmap data?
# [13:23] <hsivonen> (Flickr Uploadr defaults to junk titles by default)
# [13:24] <hsivonen> (one of the reasons why I don't use Flickr Uploadr)
# [13:24] <Hixie> webben: we are far, far beyond "nice to have"s here. "nice to have" would be alternative text and non-blind users.
# [13:24] <Hixie> Lachy: in response to what user command?
# [13:24] <webben> Hixie: alternative text and non-blind users involves substantial human effort.
# [13:24] <Hixie> hsivonen: if there is no useful data to give, there is no useful data to give.
# [13:24] <webben> All I'm suggesting is Flickr add an attribute.
# [13:24] <Lachy> Hixie, I don't know the commands. I assumed in just reading the page linearly
# [13:25] <Hixie> webben: apparently finding a solution that makes even a small number of people happy here also requires a lot of effort.
# [13:25] <hsivonen> hmm. unless I'm mistaken, fixing the memory leaks in Jing and in my parser made the batch validator go *a lot* faster
# [13:26] <Hixie> Lachy: reading linearly you would get something like. "Untitled page. One heading. My cat. Image." or some such.
# [13:26] <webben> Oh well, at least with the implementation of aria attributes, they'll be some way to explicitly associate images and titles, regardless of the conformance criteria.
# [13:26] <Lachy> ok. So it wouldn't say the heading twice? Once when it saw the heading, and then again when it saw the image related to that heading?
# [13:26] <hsivonen> I guess that's both the effect of less GC and the effect of a smaller pattern cache in Jing
# [13:26] <Hixie> Lachy: the proposal i mentioned only has relevance for when the user navigates on a per-image basis.
# [13:27] <Lachy> ok
# [13:28] <webben> It might be worth taking someone taking something like WebAnywhere or Fire Vox or NVDA or Orca and hacking it to see if making the spec's assumptions about how UAs should derive text alternatives actually work for real users. Might be useful for jgraham 's table markup variations too.
# [13:29] <webben> dunno if there's an easily hackable text browser.
# [13:30] <webben> emacs/w3 perhaps, if you like lisp.
# [13:38] <annevk> More namespace confusion: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Aug/0675.html
# [13:39] <annevk> Martin made really weird assumptions there...
# [13:40] <annevk> Though since he assumed I didn't get namespaces maybe they did make sense...
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# [13:57] <hsivonen> so my tokenizer code had a bug with document.write('</SCRIPT\> \n');
# [13:58] <hsivonen> yay for crazy real-world test data
# [13:58] <Hixie> what was the bug?
# [13:59] <hsivonen> Hixie: it returned to data state upon \ instead of returning to whatever flattened content model flag state it came from
# [13:59] <webben> Hixie: If an img without alt is under a heading but also has labelledby, would labelledby take priority over the heading as a label for img during non-linear navigation?
# [14:00] <Hixie> hsivonen: fun
# [14:00] <Hixie> hsivonen: that's a pretty funny case, i'd never thought of escaping the > as a way to make the tag not an end tag :-)
# [14:00] <Hixie> webben: i have no idea, depends on how aria is defined
# [14:01] <Hixie> webben: right now aria is a big mess, so it's probably not defined in enough detail to determine an answer
# [14:02] * hsivonen suspects that Jing still has some cache hashtable somewhere that just keeps filling up...
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# [14:17] <Hixie> nn
# [14:22] <webben> night Hixie :)
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# [15:40] <hsivonen> interestingly, javac compiles the tokenizer loop into a bit tighter byte code than ecj
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# [16:26] <kangax> Does anyone know if gecko 1.9 supports shadowColor/shadowOffsetX/etc.
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# [16:42] * zcorpan finds three attributes in firefox he didn't know before: HTMLImageElement.naturalHeight and naturalWidth, and HTMLElement.spellcheck
# [16:42] <zcorpan> should videoWidth be renamed to naturalWidth?
# [16:43] <annevk> videoWidth is more intuitive
# [16:44] <zcorpan> safari has naturalWidth too
# [16:45] <zcorpan> but consistency is nice
# [16:45] <zcorpan> how long has spellcheck been there?
# [16:46] <zcorpan> spellcheck doesn't work with contenteditable -- only input and textarea
# [16:49] <annevk> Safari has extensions?
# [16:49] <annevk> grmbl
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# [17:19] <annevk> Anyone has a good presentation on <video> in HTML5? :angel:
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# [17:24] <kangax> Does Gecko 1.9 support canvas shadow-related methods?
# [17:28] <Philip`> kangax: No
# [17:29] <kangax> strange
# [17:29] <Philip`> kangax: (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=310682 has a patch that should get into Firefox 3.1)
# [17:29] <kangax> Philip`: Why do they actually exist in context then?
# [17:31] <kangax> Philip`: thanks for the link
# [17:33] <Philip`> kangax: Because it's much easier to implement the properties than the functionality
# [17:33] <kangax> so those are sort of placeholders for now. makes sense.
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# [18:05] <hsivonen> I wish Maven allowed developers to serve GPG-signed files over HTTP from somewhere
# [18:05] <hsivonen> last time I looked, they wanted *their* machine to ssh into the developer's package seeding machine
# [18:06] <hsivonen> which is a bit weird as a solution
# [18:06] <gsnedders> My tongue is so sore…
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# [18:47] <hsivonen> I wonder how much overhead python dicts have...
# [18:48] <hsivonen> per entry that is
# [18:48] <hsivonen> in terms of RAM
# [18:54] <Xenos> 42
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# [19:14] <jcranmer> 42 yoctobits or 42 yottabits?
# [19:15] <krijnh> hsivonen, tantek: i'll start logging #microformats as well
# [19:16] <jcranmer> this channel is logged?
# [19:16] * jcranmer looks at the camera and waves "Hi mom!"
# [19:17] * gsnedders yawns
# [19:18] * gsnedders is working on the spec-gen
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# [19:19] <BenMillard> jcranmer, yes, the Room Topic gives the URL for it: http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/
# [19:21] <jcranmer> BenMillard: I was being facetious there
# [19:25] <BenMillard> d'oh :|
# [19:26] <BenMillard> hsivonen, are you going to the W3C meeting in October 2008?
# [19:28] <hsivonen> BenMillard: I want to go, but I haven't secured funding yet
# [19:28] <BenMillard> (specifically, this: http://www.w3.org/2008/10/TPAC/Overview.html)
# [19:28] <BenMillard> hsivonen, I'm in a similar situation at the moment
# [19:29] <BenMillard> if Hixie were to attend it would be easier for me to justify my attendence
# [19:29] <BenMillard> I know annevk will be there, so I'm checking for other WHATWG/HTMLWG type people
# [19:29] <BenMillard> jgraham, would you be going there?
# [19:32] <annevk> jgraham will be away
# [19:32] <annevk> I happen to know
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# [19:33] <BenMillard> annevk, thanks
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# [19:33] <BenMillard> annevk, will you be doing much in relation to HTML5? my intention is to present analysis and foster discussion of the 2008 collections amongst HTMLWG type people there
# [19:36] <annevk> it's a bit unclear yet whether the HTML WG is meeting there, not?
# [19:36] <annevk> anyway, I'm certainly available for HTML5 discussion
# [19:37] <annevk> (the first two days, as well as the first Sunday, I'll be in the CSS WG meeting; no real plan for the rest of the week)
# [19:37] <BenMillard> annevk, I saw HTML WG listed on Thursday and Friday: http://www.w3.org/2008/10/TPAC/Schedule.html#Thurs
# [19:38] <annevk> ok, good
# [19:38] <annevk> i'll be there then :)
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# [19:44] <BenMillard> Lachy, will you be at the W3C meeting in October 2008?
# [19:44] * gsnedders needs to do something about hotels
# [19:49] <BenMillard> gsnedders, so you plan to attend?
# [19:50] <gsnedders> BenMillard: Well I'm in Lyon till the 17th and I have a flight back from Nice in the 25th, so I need to do something in between :)
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# [19:50] <BenMillard> gsnedders, it seems W3C have a "block of rooms" reserved at the venue for attendees: http://www.w3.org/2008/10/TPAC/Overview.html#Hotel
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# [19:51] <gsnedders> BenMillard: At great expense.
# [19:51] <BenMillard> ah
# [19:51] <gsnedders> BenMillard: There was talk about room sharing, but I'm waiting on primarily smedro to find out what he's doing
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# [19:51] <BenMillard> yeah, Mozilla suggested that I share a room if I was comfortable with doing so, which I probably am
# [19:52] <gsnedders> BenMillard: When are you going to be ther?E
# [19:52] <gsnedders> *there
# [19:52] * gsnedders is likely going to spend a day or two somewhere in Cannes first
# [19:52] <BenMillard> Thursday and Friday would be definite, since that has specific HTMLWG meetings
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# [19:54] <BenMillard> I suggested attending Monday and Tuesday for WCAG stuff, explaining HTML5's research-based approach to accessibility features to people I meet and so forth
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# [19:55] <gsnedders> Web Applications WG — Group 2 would be interesting, but member confidential :(
# [19:56] <BenMillard> I figure the longer I'm there, the more I can do to build bridges between HTML5 and other groups face-to-face
# [19:56] <BenMillard> not sure if Mozilla Foundation will buy that, though :P
# [19:56] <gsnedders> :P
# [19:56] * gsnedders has the advantage of being truly independent :P
# [19:57] <BenMillard> would you be there on Thursday and Friday?
# [19:57] <BenMillard> hey, one of us should take a PS2 and some Gran Turismo games :)
# [19:57] <gsnedders> I'll certainly be there Thurs/Fri
# [19:57] <gsnedders> My PS2 crashes disks now, sometimes :(
# [19:58] <gsnedders> *scratches
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# [19:58] <gsnedders> GT4 is scratched and unplayable
# [19:58] <gsnedders> Well, you can play it, you just need to restart the console after every race :D
# [19:58] <gsnedders> And nothing gets saved
# [19:58] <BenMillard> my PS-Two is tiny; the discs are in good running order; memory cards etc work fine and have good car selection.
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# [19:59] <gsnedders> BenMillard: NTSC/PAL?
# [19:59] <BenMillard> PAL...
# [19:59] <gsnedders> Worth checking :)
# [19:59] <BenMillard> yeah, will that work in Europe?
# [19:59] <gsnedders> Yeah
# [19:59] <BenMillard> is that "yes, it will work"? :)
# [20:00] <gsnedders> Yes.
# [20:00] <gsnedders> France still in part uses SECAM, but everything in all SECAM places supports PAL as well
# [20:01] * gsnedders can bring a game or two and memories cards with saves
# [20:01] <gsnedders> heh. This is so useful for the future of the web.
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# [20:01] <BenMillard> cool, so how about we share a room for Thursday and Friday? I'd arrive on Wedesday since meetings start so early on Thursday
# [20:02] <BenMillard> so maybe Wednesday-Friday?
# [20:02] <gsnedders> BenMillard: you not going to the TP itself, then?
# [20:02] <BenMillard> gsnedders, the more I think about it the less I can justify it, given that it's someone else's money I'll be going on
# [20:03] <gsnedders> I'll see if smedro has made his mind up about when he'll be there yet, because if he's there for the entire week I'll probably share a room with him
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# [20:03] <gsnedders> s/smedro/smedero/g
# [20:07] <BenMillard> gsnedders, the form has a "Number of persons" field so I imagine there are 3-person rooms? http://www.w3.org/2008/03/TPAC2008-hotelform.html
# [20:07] <BenMillard> (I'm kind of a noob at travelling so I'd find it comforting to be part of a group)
# [20:13] <hsivonen> sigh. the transcript discussion
# [20:14] <hsivonen> the right way to deal with users not hearing the audio track of video is captioning
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# [20:23] <webben> hsivonen: that's not useful for deafblind people.
# [20:24] <webben> if you had a compound format producing both audio descriptions and captioning, you could extract a useable transcript from that though.
# [20:24] <hsivonen> webben: if the captioning is text (not bitmap), theoretically you could detach it from the temporal axis and feed it to a braille renderer
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# [20:24] <webben> hsivonen: captioning doesn't tell you what's being seen.
# [20:25] <hsivonen> webben: however, it would be dumb to make things suck for deaf people just because the same solution doesn't work for a significantly less common combination of disabilities
# [20:25] <webben> hsivonen: is someone suggesting _not_ supplying captioning?
# [20:27] <hsivonen> webben: suggesting that video accessibility solution would be transcript pretty much implies that the person didn't consider captioning, but I could be wrong.
# [20:27] <webben> hsivonen: I guess the assumption there (not entirely right) is that everyone could make sense of the transcript.
# [20:27] <webben> it's at least true that deaf people could use a transcript too.
# [20:28] <webben> I'd strongly disagree that one shouldn't also provide captioning though. :)
# [20:28] <webben> since that's likely to be better for that user group, as you say.
# [20:29] <hsivonen> also, transcript as fallback sucks, because transcripts are also useful to people who see and hear just fine
# [20:29] <webben> hsivonen: I think this is a case where being able to demark an area of the page or a URL as "equivalent" to the video is preferable to merely falling back.
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# [20:30] <webben> <transcription for=
# [20:30] <webben> (or whatever)
# [20:30] <webben> transcription="{uri}"
# [20:31] <hsivonen> <a href="{uri}">Transcript</a>
# [20:32] <webben> hsivonen: That suffers from the usual problem of having to look around the page to find a transcript, rather than being able to go straight to it via the video
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# [20:38] * webben wonders why the WebKit implementation of alt hides most of the alt text.
# [20:38] <webben> (when images are disabled)
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# [20:39] <webben> hmm maybe that's OmniWeb, Safari won't even show the alt
# [20:39] <tantek> thanks krijnh. I presume the logs will eventually be available at http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/microformats ?
# [20:40] <gsnedders> BenMillard: Where are you from anyway?
# [20:40] <webben> iCab shows an empty square ... "useful"
# [20:43] <webben> hmm ... current WebKit shows nothing when you untick Display images when the page opens
# [20:43] <BenMillard> gsnedders, Fleet, Hampshire, England: http://projectcerbera.com/me/
# [20:44] <webben> happens in Safari 3.1 too
# [20:45] <BenMillard> webben, if the link is right next to the <video> then it's fine
# [20:45] <BenMillard> putting relevant links in relevant positions is a usability issue for authors to judge, rather than a format limitation, imho
# [20:45] <webben> BenMillard: it's not ideal f you're using a navigation control to jump from video to video.
# [20:46] <webben> *if
# [20:46] <webben> at which point "hunt around the page" includes stop processing by type of thing and start linearly reading the page.
# [20:47] <BenMillard> webben, if a user interacts with a page in a restrictive ways then a restrictive experience is what they wanted, I imagine
# [20:47] <BenMillard> a "read from here" command should make it easy as pie to find a link immediately after a <video>
# [20:47] <BenMillard> (or any other element, for that matter)
# [20:47] <webben> BenMillard: it's an unnecessary extra step
# [20:48] <webben> and doubtless doomed to disappointment in most cases
# [20:48] <BenMillard> that doesn't tally with my experience of observing users (which is far from exhaustive, though)
# [20:49] <webben> which? that's it's unnecessary? or that it's disappointing?
# [20:49] <BenMillard> both
# [20:49] <BenMillard> webben, specialist features for interacting in very specific ways tend to be what cause dissapointment since pages usually get them wrong; whereas simple proximity is usually convenient and intuitive
# [20:49] <gsnedders> BenMillard: Speaking of about pages, I need to write a new one :)
# [20:50] <BenMillard> (convenient and intuitive for both users and authors)
# [20:51] <webben> BenMillard: I'm not sure what I've seen of these things agrees with that. But that could be logically true without contradicting "unnecessary" or "disappointing" when you don't find a transcript.
# [20:52] <BenMillard> webben, if a transcript is not available to a user who would like one, their dissapointment is with the lack of facilities provided by the author rather than the lack of facilities provided by the format
# [20:52] <webben> BenMillard: What I've seen is screen reader users, at least, explicitly requesting the ability to jump between different sorts of objects _and_ the ability to jump to content _and_ the ability to read from here.
# [20:52] <webben> BenMillard: Yes. But the format is forcing them to search for it.
# [20:53] <webben> i.e. making the entire process more cumbersome
# [20:53] <BenMillard> webben, if the link is immediately after the <video> (as it would be in a usably designed page) then they would find it immediately anyway :)
# [20:53] <hsivonen> hmm. if I try to validate a million pages and log URL and message for later processing, the file will be excessive in size :-(
# [20:54] <hsivonen> I wonder if gzip will do the right magic for me since there will be a lot of common substrings
# [20:54] <webben> BenMillard: if I had a catalog of multiple videos in a page, I don't really want to have to jump to each video, and then look for a transcript, I just want to jump to each video and be told if there's a transcript.
# [20:54] <webben> it's still an extra step
# [20:55] <webben> because there's no way a UA can do that for you
# [20:55] <webben> heck, if there was explicit markup, one could just pull up the videos in the formats acceptable to you
# [20:56] <webben> sod inspecting each one individually :)
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# [20:57] <BenMillard> webben, you may be overthinking the problem...equally I may be underthinking it. either way, the amount of web content I've studied shows re-using simple structures in simple ways (like an <a href> near to where you need it) is more reliably authored (and therefore more robust) than specialist facilities in the language to do nearly the same thing
# [20:58] <webben> I'm not sure I care about it being reliably authored. I'd want to see that markup in major sources of videos.
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# [20:58] <webben> That is to say, if it makes YouTube better that's a huge win.
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# [20:59] <BenMillard> if a feature is not reliably authored, nobody wins because it won't work
# [20:59] <BenMillard> so I put a higher value on reliability, but that might just be me
# [20:59] <webben> it not working on Joe Blogg's site is a lot less important than it working on YouTube.
# [21:00] <webben> I suspect Google's engineers are capable of generating such markup (indeed, vastly more complicated markup, if they wanted to).
# [21:00] <BenMillard> in contrast, a simpler feature which works everywhere provides a more stable experience for users (even if it takes one extra key press and half a second more aural output each time)
# [21:01] <BenMillard> webben, ultimately it's Hixie who decides where the balance is, I suppose :)
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# [21:02] <webben> I'd certainly agree that simple features are better. However, having explicit markup to associate with transcripts can be an enhancement to the simpler markup.
# [21:03] <webben> it's not an either/or situation
# [21:03] <webben> it's a bit like microformats being built on top of simpler structures.
# [21:05] <BenMillard> indeed. but if the simple feature is adequate for user needs (which would take user testing to establish one way or another, I imagine) then the explicit markup is just a side-show; complicating the authoring process and adding one more way for things to go wrong
# [21:05] <BenMillard> for example, consider automatic association of <th> and <td> versus <td headers> for every data cell and <th id> for every header cell
# [21:06] <webben> BenMillard: I think I'd agree depending on what adequate means.
# [21:06] <webben> I'd prefer people to have a good web experience rather than a merely adequate one.
# [21:07] <BenMillard> I'd define "adequate" as something like "task can be completed by users in a timely manner"
# [21:07] <BenMillard> webben, but I expect the user testing people have a better idea of it that I
# [21:07] <webben> that sounds reasonable
# [21:08] <webben> it's the timeliness we have differing suspicions about in this case.
# [21:08] <BenMillard> indeed :)
# [21:08] <BenMillard> webben, will you be at the W3C meeting in October 2008?
# [21:09] * webben works for a W3C organization and therefore has no official W3C involvement.
# [21:09] <webben> *W3C member organization
# [21:09] <BenMillard> is that a no, then?
# [21:09] <webben> I don't know anything about it, but I doubt it.
# [21:10] <BenMillard> webben, oh well, perhaps we meet another time. the page about it is here: http://www.w3.org/2008/10/TPAC/Overview.html
# [21:10] <webben> ah, thanks :)
# [21:11] <BenMillard> I'm hoping to be there from Wednesday to Friday, funding permitting
# [21:12] <webben> cool
# [21:12] <webben> well, someone from my company should be there somewhere, at any rate
# [21:13] * gsnedders notes the docs for the spec-gen are crazy
# [21:13] <webben> it's in a casino - is anyone actually going to do any work there ;)
# [21:14] <webben> looks like a great locale
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# [21:20] <Dashiva> Firefox 3 supports 'content: url(data:...)', doesn't it?
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# [21:29] <webben> Dashiva: Does it?
# [21:30] <webben> Dashiva: it doesn't support content:url(.....png);
# [21:31] <Dashiva> I found the bug. They only support the css2 version, which is really crippled.
# [21:32] * webben wishes support for content:url was better since it would mean we could have significantly less failsome image replacement techniques.
# [21:33] <Dashiva> Spec's been WD for five years now
# [21:33] <Dashiva> And it's all Hixie's fault :P
# [21:34] <webben> That Hixie. Tsk tsk. It's not like he's got any other specs to edit ;)
# [21:37] <BenMillard> webben, <img src alt> does the image replacement aspect of image replace perfectly
# [21:37] <BenMillard> *image replacement
# [21:38] <webben> not perfectly if you want to be able to change the skin
# [21:38] <webben> also not perfectly if you want to use css spriting
# [21:38] <webben> but yes, I do tend to recommend (actively agitate for?) img over CSS image replacement
# [21:39] <BenMillard> webben, skinning systems in forums I've used (phpBB, Invision, Ikonboard and vBulletin) will change the src when the user changes their theme
# [21:39] <BenMillard> theme selection is server-side rather than client-side in those systems to achieve this
# [21:39] <webben> BenMillard: Yeah, you've got to complicate the skinning system to include changing HTML.
# [21:40] <webben> I'd also just prefer to use img for content images, not style.
# [21:40] <BenMillard> if you are doing image *replacement* then you are doing it to some content
# [21:40] <BenMillard> as such, the image is content when doing image replacement
# [21:40] <webben> BenMillard: Doesn't help people who want to skin things themselves though.
# [21:41] <webben> BenMillard: Only accidentally.
# [21:41] <Dashiva> Nor people who write userjs
# [21:41] <Dashiva> (or usercss, rather)
# [21:41] <webben> Dashiva: that's what I mean
# [21:41] <webben> well, or other ways of skinning
# [21:41] <BenMillard> Dashiva, when will a user write CSS to change the image being replaced by an author's image replacement CSS?
# [21:41] <webben> BenMillard: That is, if CSS supported it, we'd use CSS and the img would be text, not an img.
# [21:42] <Dashiva> BenMillard: The author isn't replacing anything, the user is
# [21:42] <webben> BenMillard: If I found it hard to read text in images, I'd probably just block content:
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# [21:42] <webben> or at least content:url with certain mime types
# [21:43] <BenMillard> webben, that case is handled by disabling images to show their alt text, afaict?
# [21:43] <webben> yeah, but that's a rubbish user experience
# [21:43] <webben> I don't want to prevent myself see photos
# [21:43] <webben> *seeing
# [21:43] <Dashiva> Like the very reason I started talking about this: I want to make all blank gifs on a certain page become a different gif. So I use content: url(data:...)
# [21:43] <BenMillard> Dashiva, sorry I worded that badly. I meant: "When will a user write CSS to change the image being applied by an author's image replacement CSS?
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# [22:11] * Hixie writes the first and probably only ever e-mail in which he says RDF isn't the problem
# [22:11] <Hixie> element.spellcheck is something that i specced out which will likely end up in html5 if the experimental implementations come back positive
# [22:11] <Hixie> i think firefox had it first
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# [22:27] <BenMillard> Hixie, have you seen https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441445 ? I suggested Aaron contact you directly about processing table headers in Firefox.
# [22:28] <BenMillard> I don't know the Andrew Downie dude but I've met Marco Zehe and Aaron
# [22:29] <BenMillard> (interestingly, the attached table is regular so it doesn't really need headers+id, afaict)
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# [22:35] <annevk> http://www.longnow.org/about/ so five digit years to solve the deca-millennium bug, what about the hecto-millennium bug?
# [22:35] <annevk> it doesn't make much sense at all
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# [22:42] <webben> ambitious engineering project though
# [22:42] <webben> getting anything working for 10,000 years
# [22:43] * webben goes off to "Mind mythic depth"
# [22:45] <annevk> as long as the project doesn't require everyone to relabel xxxx as 0xxxx...
# [22:45] <BenMillard> annevk is talking specifically about: "The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years."
# [22:46] <Xenos> Let's just hope that we get cryogenics in time to deep-freeze some COBOL programmers, or they'll have problems fixing them timer bugs near y10k :p
# [22:46] <Dashiva> Yeah, because the Y2K problem happened because we didn't have enough decimal digits to write 2000...
# [22:46] <BenMillard> variable-length year numbers naturally solve the problem anyway
# [22:47] <annevk> I think HTML5 does variable-width year at some places, and fixed width at some others...
# [22:48] <BenMillard> 1996 isn't going to mean 11996 after time has progressed 10,000 years if people write 11996 for that era
# [22:48] <annevk> ouch, http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/08/23/html5-rdfa-and-microformats/ is six pages :/
# [22:49] <BenMillard> just like 996 didn't start meaning 1996 when we reached 1996
# [22:49] <annevk> BenMillard, yeah, like I said, it's silly
# [22:49] <tantek> indeed it is. I wonder how long leading 0s have been unnecessary in numerical notation.
# [22:49] <BenMillard> annevk, I'm just illustrating how right you are about that :)
# [22:49] <annevk> but maybe they mean it in the Dashiva way, in which case I'd argue for solving that by something better than just adding space for an extra digit
# [22:50] <Dashiva> Like hexadecimal years :D
# [22:52] <tantek> 0x7D8 - still takes 5 characters ;)
# [22:52] <BenMillard> annevk, each page seems very short except for page 3...even that one isn't very long
# [22:52] <Dashiva> But the 0x removes the whole ambiguity problem
# [22:53] <BenMillard> annevk, for me, the entry would be more readable (and less daunting) on a single page. I think pagination is a mistake in this case.
# [22:54] <BenMillard> I do like the theme of that site, though. :)
# [22:54] <BenMillard> (visual theme, I mean)
# [22:54] <tantek> it's too bad people view posts on email lists as work/progress
# [22:55] <tantek> in my experience, quantity of posts on email lists usually mean noise, inexperience, not RTFM, repeating discussions etc.
# [22:55] <BenMillard> tantek, repeating discussions seems a common cause on Public-HTML
# [22:56] <annevk> that guy makes a lot of assumptions too about who's part of the WHATWG and who's not
# [22:56] <annevk> annoying
# [22:56] <annevk> and they assume they are smarter "We started out where most in the HTML5 community are, we thought Microformats would be the solution to the semantic web…"
# [22:57] <tantek> microformats never claimed to be a/the "solution to the semantic web"
# [22:57] <tantek> why would you claim to be something that might be impossible?
# [22:57] <annevk> :)
# [22:58] <tantek> I long gave up on trying to "keep up" with people that have more time than me on email lists.
# [22:59] <tantek> It's a futile effort, and doing so just succumbs to their (perhaps unintentional) denial of productivity attack (dopa) http://tantek.pbwiki.com/DenialOfProductivityAttack
# [23:00] <Hixie> "it's too bad people view posts on email lists as work/progress" <-- couldn't agree more
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# [23:00] <Hixie> BenMillard: not sure what to say on that bug, but haven't heard from aaron yet
# [23:00] <Hixie> ok meeting bbiab
# [23:01] <BenMillard> Hixie, looked like they were thinking of implementing header association as defined in HTML5
# [23:01] <hsivonen> BenMillard: I think it would be great if Gecko implemented the association algorithm
# [23:01] <annevk> I'm giving up on replying to non-technical e-mails in <video> threads on public-html
# [23:01] <annevk> (well, I will try)
# [23:03] <BenMillard> hsivonen, yes me too!
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# [23:03] <BenMillard> hsivonen, I'd prefer if HTML5's algorithm was nearer to the Smart Headers algorithm in allowing headers to point at <td> and letting headers associate with headers...maybe a real implementation will cast more light on those aspects.
# [23:04] <annevk> http://5090.fawm.org/songs.php?id=2303 is funny
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# [23:05] <hsivonen> BenMillard: I don't know which algorithm is better, but I'm confident that it has a better chance of working in practice if it is up to Gecko developer rather than up to AT developers
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# [23:07] <BenMillard> hsivonen, well, there are far fewer AT-compatible browsers than there are ATs
# [23:08] <BenMillard> so doing it in the browser means fewer implementations are needed to provide the feature to the same number of users
# [23:08] <Dashiva> hsivonen: At least the Gecko developers try to develop :)
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# [23:09] <hsivonen> annevk: the six-page blog format is weird
# [23:09] <annevk> uhuh
# [23:10] <BenMillard> hsivonen, I thought the same thing :)
# [23:10] <annevk> http://www.w3.org/2008/08/20-xhtml-minutes.html#item04 "SP: trying to reflect reality, so it is ok to deliver XHTML using text/html because IT JUST WORKS"
# [23:10] <annevk> right
# [23:11] <annevk> meanwhile on planet earth...
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# [23:17] <hsivonen> the digitalbazaar blog post reminds me of http://webbackplane.com/standard
# [23:18] <BenMillard> Hixie, turns out my message to Aaronlev about that bug didn't reach him, so I've resent to a different account he has
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# [23:23] <webben> aaronlev is actually in channel, if that helps
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# [23:24] <BenMillard> webben, he's in #accessibility which is where I'm talking with him, too
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# [23:25] <webben> oh, so you are :)
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# [23:29] <hsivonen> http://esw.w3.org/topic/PF/XTech/HTML5/AccesskeyRequirements
# [23:29] <krijnh> tantek: jep, indeed (sorry, my train and wifi went away)
# [23:30] <annevk> today we thank him, tomorrow we "curse" him for all the pr0n that replaced our logs
# [23:30] <krijnh> :)
# [23:31] <krijnh> tantek: I'll probably have time to fix the pages on Wednesday, perhaps tomorrow
# [23:31] <Dashiva> SM: putting onBlur on SCRIPT doesn't mean anything
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# [23:36] * hsivonen wonders how many email iterations it will take to tease out that SQL storage and RDFa are different, because at least two of {Mozilla, WebKit, Opera, IE, Gears} teams wanted to ship a JS API for sqlite
# [23:37] <BenMillard> hsivonen, I don't know if there's an actual desire for header association to be implemented in Gecko by following HTML5...it's just what I read between the lines of comments near the end of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441445
# [23:37] <BenMillard> I don't want to get in trouble or raise false hopes :)
# [23:38] <gsnedders> hsivonen: 42n, where n approaches ∞.
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# [23:41] <gsnedders> Lachy: I realized that if I do ever write RSS5, nobody is actually going to publish it as a standard, so I may as well put things like, "The editor recommends eating pasta while implementing this specification; however, Lachlan Hunt recommends eating a hamburger instead." in it
# [23:42] <Dashiva> Can't you make Atom5 instead?
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# [23:43] <gsnedders> Dashiva: But it defines RSS, and not Atom!
# [23:43] <gsnedders> Atom is in a far better state than RSS!
# [23:44] <Dashiva> Exactly, so let's just let RSS wander off and die over the next twenty years :)
# [23:45] <gsnedders> Dashiva: People still need to implement it, like HTML :P
# [23:45] <Dashiva> We have the universal feed parser :P
# [23:45] <gsnedders> Only in Python :P
# [23:45] <gsnedders> But hey, SimplePie mostly works in PHP :P
# [23:46] <Dashiva> One platform, one language, one runtime
# [23:46] <gsnedders> Not one prize, one goal, one golden glance of what should be?
# [23:47] <Dashiva> Glances aren't all that useful for binding things in darkness
# [23:51] * gsnedders wonders whether he could get into Stanford
# [23:51] <annevk> W3C Validator does HTML5 too, albeit with the same code as Validator.nu
# [23:51] <annevk> (and only the beta)
# [23:51] <gsnedders> annevk: Since when!?
# [23:52] <hsivonen> gsnedders: since a few minutes ago
# [23:52] <gsnedders> heh.
# [23:53] <annevk> #whatwg is like a very live feed reader now and then, maybe we should feed every single line to twitter :)
# [23:54] <Xenos> twit-rooms :p
# [23:54] <gsnedders> hah.
# [23:54] <annevk> some IRC thingies have this option to do "blog: hahaha", maybe something to look into (<< krijnh)
# [23:54] <gsnedders> High volume tweeting.
# [23:54] <gsnedders> blog: gsnedders is God.
# [23:54] <hsivonen> it seems to me that there are four big runtimes: C, JVM, CLR and The Browser
# [23:54] <annevk> CLR?
# [23:55] <hsivonen> JavaScript and Java run on all four
# [23:55] <gsnedders> annevk: .NET
# [23:55] <hsivonen> are there others that run on all four?
# [23:55] <annevk> Python, for some browsers
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# [23:56] <hsivonen> annevk: but there isn't anything like GWT for Python, is there?
# [23:56] <annevk> I don't think so, though they might be planning it I suppose
# [23:57] <hsivonen> (when I said Java runs on The Browser runtime, I meant via GWT)
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# [23:59] * annevk was thinking "milennium, meganium"; as it happens Meganium has 139.000 results on Google; it's a Pokémon
# [23:59] * hsivonen wants to get the Validator.nu HTML Parser running on all the four runtimes
# [23:59] <hsivonen> 2 out of 4 covered already
# Session Close: Tue Aug 26 00:00:00 2008

The end :)