The Mederos

by Julie and Shawn Medero.

Writing about our family, personal lives, professional interests, and occasional wackyness.

Updates from Shawn Medero Feed

  • 09:51:55 am on October 23, 2008 | 2 | # |
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    I’m at the W3C TPAC, in Mandelieu, France, doing my small part to keep the web moving forward. It is always said that the best part of any conference is the non-standard face-to-face meetings: hallway chats, chance encounters, lunches, and dinners. I’ve been doing my best to take advantage of these moments, like hanging out with a mixture of Opera employees and some of the more active WhatWG members:


    In the photo left to right: Me, Arve Bersvendsen, Lachlan Hunt*, Ian Hickson*, Anne van Kesteren*, and Geoffrey Sneddon*. Photo taken by Kai Hendry.
    * Evil Cabal Member

    Too much of our work happens over the internet (IRC, email, blogs, wikis, etc), for obvious reasons, and meeting in-person at least once a year gives you a chance to attach something more tangible to the experience. We each have our own “quirks mode” that is difficult to understand in a medium like email unless you’ve caught of the mannerisms, facial expressions, vocalizations, etc before hand.

     

  • 02:54:31 pm on September 26, 2008 | 0 | # |
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    A good overview of the “demoable” bits of HTML 5 (it is hard or too boring to demo lots of the parsing, dom consistency, error handling changes).

     

  • 04:03:28 pm on August 30, 2008 | 0 | # |
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    Martin has been itching to climb anything he can find at the playgrounds near our house. Last week he finally figured out the rope ladder, video after the cut.

    (More …)

     

  • 11:29:52 am on August 28, 2008 | 0 | # |
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    Matt Haughey talks about how weblog comments have become nothing more than 1-up showmanship.

    His post gets to the heart of why I’ve disabled comments on my personal weblogs for the last couple year. When we started up this blog, I decided to enable comments because we do enjoy talking with family, friends, and strangers. Additionally we are going to go to great lengths to set the tone in the comments section per post… every post is different in nature and sometimes whacky & randomness rules the day… other times a little storytelling is required.

    … Back to Matt’s post, there were a number of great replies (because of the subject matter and also people know that Matt won’t tolerate nonsense on his personal site), the one from David Wertheimer is interesting because it talks about Matt’s project Metafilter:

    Your problem is basic scalability. It’s the same thing that happened on Metafilter: when it had 3,000 users, it was divine; at a runaway 30,000 users, it got a bit maniacal. Your pragmatic solution (five bucks! barrier to entry!) was both profitable and had the added impact of preserving community and signal:noise, as a quick look at the free Yahoo Answers will attest.

    Indeed. If sites like Y! Answers charged a $5 “activation fee” for each user account they probably weed out a lot of the noise. That runs counter to yesterday’s post from 37signals’ that “activation fees are obscene” because in the Metafilter case the fee is reasonable and the end result (better signal) was highly desirable to that community.

     

  • 08:59:00 am on August 26, 2008 | 0 | # |
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    I’ll start by saying I’m by no means an accessibility expert, etc etc etc and this is just a general summary of the state of things… not an endorsement of any one proposal, method, group/faction/junta/cabal/etc.

    If you were following but dropped out of the <img> & @alt discussion going on in HTML 5 for the last several months - Ian Hickson has a new summary of all the numerous proposals, research, problems, spec changes, etc. Somehow two people publicly responded to Ian’s email in 5 minutes or less… I guess I’m slow because it took me probably thirty minutes to read the email, go back and research the various previous and current drafts, review all the cited links, etc.

    In terms of proposals, there’s really only two core solutions to providing accessible text for <img> resources:

    1. @alt is always required full stop.
    2. @alt is available to use but not required.

    (It has been suggested several times on public-html, forums, and blogs that HTML 5 removed the possibility to provide @alt text - this never never happened. @alt was made optional in early editor’s drafts, but not removed. Now that we have that cleared up…)

    Every other proposal is a variant of these two… that is provide guidance and conformance language that determines that type of text that must be present under certain conditions. Often those conditions can’t be checked by a machine. This is where the fun starts.

    HTML 4 choose solution #1 and whether you consider that choice successful or not depends on what your desired end-game was:

    • Wide spread tool support for entering alternative text? Mostly good. Even Microsoft Word lets you enter @alt content.
    • Wide spread use of @alt by authors in which the alternative content adequately describes the referring image? Not so good. Quite poor really. @alt is often missing altogether, present but empty, or simply repeats the image’s file name. Lame.

    I can sympathize with the folks who feel that requiring @alt led to better tool support. Software engineers like requirements documents, test cases, etc. If the spec says “required, full stop.” it is easy enough to satisfy that condition.

    At the same time I’m more of a “make it possible to do things with technology and step back” guy… provide a method of storing the alternative text but actually requiring it seems bizarre since we don’t have the appropriate artificial intelligence technology to check whether the alternative text describes the image resource to the various audiences. One problem with @alt is that has to describe the image as the author “sees” it as well as how end-users, spiders, and 3rd party services would like to interpret it as well.

    Besides the legacy problems of @alt, there are front-end interface problems… such as it is particularly cumbersome to provide @alt text for say 25 images you just uploaded from your Nokia smart-phone or even an Apple iPhone. I don’t envision a lot of consumers patiently navigating through that experience.

    Finally, there is a disconnect between what must be done now and what will be necessary when HTML 5 is fully deployed in the wild… which, in theory, is roughly a decade from now. Mobile web browsing is going to be wildly popular in 10 years and it will expose the UI problems even more than they are now. A solution that seems acceptable and fair today will be different than one suitable for ten years from now.

    There’s no magic bullet for alternative text on the web. The solution requires a mechanism for software or, ideally, a human to describe an image through text and there are really several of these in HTML 5:

    • @alt

    @alt alone is not sufficient for all use cases. Supplying one of more of the following might be a way forward:

    • @role
    • @title
    • <legend>
    • <figure>

    This the approach the current draft has taken, as Ian wrote in his email:

    Are there cases where the image is lacking good alt text that wouldn’t be covered by one of the following?:

    • title=”” attribute on the <img> itself
    • <legend> of the <figure> that contains the <img>
    • heading of the section that contains the <img>

    We could say that for these “key content without alt text” cases, we have the alt=”” attribute omitted, but there must be at least one of the above, and the first of the above that is present must include sufficient information to orient the user.

    I like the new draft a lot better — not just because of this approach, but the overall language (thanks to much feedback from public-html) is much cleaner. I look forward to seeing how the latest language is refined over the next few months.

     

  • 03:10:03 pm on August 25, 2008 | 0 | # |
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    Seattle Transit Blog pointed to an interview in the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce with current Bellevue mayor, Grant Degginger (the article is behind a pay-wall, boo):

    Q. How do you make Bellevue more walkable?

    A. Bellevue was laid out as a suburban city and one of the legacies of that is these superblocks that are too long. We’re adding mid-block crossings … and updating and making (downtown) more visible and interesting with more artwork. I think it’s going to be very exciting to have a more walkable downtown. We’re also identifying more bike corridors, running both north to south and east to west.

    Nice to see the mayor recognizes downtown Bellevue’s many problems. Walking and bking through downtown Bellevue and the surround area (8th, 10th, 12th ave) sucks.

     

  • 03:03:37 pm on August 21, 2008 | 0 | # |
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    Because I’m avoiding yet another resurgence of the @alt debate in HTML 5, here’s an article from the Wall Street Journal about how one San Francisco citizen is attempting to halt improvements to the city’s bike infrastructure: (emphasis mine)

    New York is wooing cyclists with chartreuse bike lanes. Chicago is spending nearly $1 million for double-decker bicycle parking. San Francisco can’t even install new bike racks.

    Yikes. Thankfully, Seattle has a healthy bicycling community AND government support to continue to improve the lives of those who commute by bike (documented in the Seattle Bicycle Master Plan.) Long time residents of Seattle (those who commute by bicycle) may complain about the state of various parts of the bicycle system but recent transplants from the East Coast, like ourselves, are stupid happy. I’ve been to most of the major cities on the eastern seaboard of the United States and none of them have the bicycling resources that Seattle has. Bicycling conditions are so good here it is how how both my wife and I get to work.

    At a time when most other cities are encouraging biking as green transport, the 65-year-old local gadfly has stymied cycling-support efforts here by arguing that urban bicycle boosting could actually be bad for the environment. That’s put the brakes on everything from new bike lanes to bike racks while the city works on an environmental-impact report.

    Later…

    Cars always will vastly outnumber bikes, (Anderson) reasons, so allotting more street space to cyclists could cause more traffic jams, more idling and more pollution.

    This has me stunned because I live in the hippie capital of the world (Seattle). We have a reputation for considering the environmental impact on everything (according to NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, this includes composting are own dead bodies) and I’ve never heard a hypothesis such as Rob Anderson has put forth. Sadly the WSJ article doesn’t cite any of the studies that led Rob to his conclusion.

    Rob does have a blog and while he’s currently tracking the glorious praise of his article, I’m hoping he actually starts a conversation with his fellow citizens about his position. He does have an older post from 2006 where he describe what he calls “BikeThink” and characterize bicyclist as fundamentalist and elitist. It doesn’t describe any of the cyclist I know or speak to in my community but I don’t really attend any bicycle clubs or similar group meetings. Perhaps because my wife and I are of the opinion that Seattle’s Critical Mass group isn’t as family friendly as their website claims to be. and so we’ve avoided this crowd altogether. The cyclist I run into everyday are just commuting from home to work, usually with a bus leg in the middle due to the fact that you easily can’t get from North Seattle to Bellevue without going severely out of your way. Most complain about the bus leg over SR-520 but in general enjoy taking advantage of the major trails, like the Burke-Gilman. I’ve found that utilizing a bike for a even a fraction of my trip can eliminate one of the three buses I’m required to take to get to my office and saves me an additional 10 minutes in total trip time (sometimes more if I would have missed one of my scheduled connections.)

    Anyway, the article is an interesting look at another city is reacting to higher gas prices with improvements (or lack there of) for bicycle commuters. If you like this sorta thing, there was an article in the NYTimes earlier this summer that focused on bicycle commuters heading into Manhattan.

     

© 2008.