Archive for the 'standards' category.
Jun 26 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment
During XTech2008, Anne van Kesteren and Marcos Caceres sat down to chat about the current state of the "ARIA in HTML5" debate. Anne gives an overview of ARIA and the controversy over naming of ARIA attributes and makes some suggestions as to how the community can move forward.
Part One:
Part Two:
May 22 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 2 comments
The New York Web Standards Meetup Group will be meeting at theMechanism on 22 May 2008 (tonight!) at 7:00 pm to discuss microformats, a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.
Attend the meetup to learn what microformats are, why they were created, and how to use this simple technology to make data on webpages more easily indexed, searched, and cross-referenced
22 May 2008 . 7:00 pm
theMechanism
440 9th Avenue 11th Floor
New York, NY 10001 [map]
Please contact us if you’d like to present at the July or August meetup.
Apr 25 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 2 comments
Notes and links from last night's discussion of the WCAG Samurai Errata for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 at the New York Web Standards Meetup Group. Thanks to everyone who made it!
During the meeting, Lydia mentioned Automated Sync Technologies, a transcription and captioning services she found. They are the best priced, easiest, and most flexible transcription and captioning service she has found. Check out their help page for useful how-to videos.
Lydia also provided the following links on Adobe Flash CS3's captioning component:
Update 2008-04-30: There is a Q&A from this meetup posted at http://themechanism.com/blog/2008/04/30/wcag-samurai-errata-qa/
Please contact us if you'd like to present at the June or July meetup.
Apr 7 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 1 Comment
I'm curious what other standardistas think about this essay by Jukka "Yucca" Korpela that I stumbled upon this weekend. I thought it was pretty interesting, particularly having recently read Martian Headsets and Understanding HTML, XML and XHTML.
This is a rant that promotes validation and puts it down. The point is that if you don't know what validation really is, it won't be of much use to you, and could even be waste of time. Validation is simply a way of getting reports about complying with some formal rules. What would you do with the results if you don't know those rules?
While the whole document is probably of interest, there were a lot of things I already knew and that seemed fairly basic. However, the things I didn't know seemed particularly choice, such as:
Although there is really not much to be gained from using XHTML at present, many people have started using it. Then it becomes relevant that validation means different things for XHTML. The reason is that the metalanguage, XML, is considerably less powerful than SGML. For example, the XML DTD for XHTML 1.0 declares the
tabindexattribute as CDATA, which allows virtually anything. In the SGML DTDs of "old" HTML, the attribute is declared as NUMBER. This means that in validating against "old" HTML,tabindex="-1"is reported as an error (as it is), in XHTML validation it passes. On the other hand, XML imposes restrictions that forbid constructs that are formally correct in SGML-based HTML but not actually supported by browsers, such as the shorthand<em/text/for<em>text</em>, and this means that XHTML validation is pragmatically more useful in some ways.
And Korpela's conclusion comes down hard on the use of "Valid HTML" icons put out by the W3C:
It's useful to write valid markup, in most cases. But it's hardly useful to make a noise about it.
Analogously, it's useful to use proper punctuation when you write in English. This makes texts somewhat easier to read and understand, and it adds to the literary quality a bit. There are slightly different styles of punctuation, and you should choose one and stick to it. But it's hardly useful to make a noise thereof. Would you like to include an icon like "Checked SGUFDFY 42.5!" onto your pages and expect users to decipher that SGUFDFY 42.5 means some particular convention on punctuation?
So what do y'all standardistas out there think?
"HTML validation" is a good tool, but just a tool. Jukka "Yucca" Korpela
Mar 27 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 2 comments
Sorry for posting two Chris Heilmann reblogs in such short succession (I know, I know, like a poor man's RSS reader), but not only is his stuff so good, I wanted to reference this in tonight's NY Web Standards meetup.
From "The struggle for web standards—my presentation for Coder's Saturday in Montreal" on Wait till I come! by Chris Heilmann, published on 22 March 2008 at 7:24 PM.
Upcoming events
We endorse
