Is this thing on?

The last W3C working group I participated in, Multimodal Interaction (MMI), is at the periphery of the Web and is unlikely to make much of an impact on it in the foreseeable future. However they have produced a few interesting specs (and a few uninteresting frameworks), one of which I will return to in much greater detail later.

The most obscure one may be InkML. The name might imply a language for tagging with paint, but is really describing the set of movements registered by a touch-sensitive tablet or screen so that the scribbles you make can be processed and enhanced by someone more clever than the tablet driver. Unfortunately this specification is made by a tablet-maker subgroup that like Schrödinger's cat is living or dead depending on your perception, and the spec is progressing at a less than vital speed.

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This entry was actually made, well conceptualised, back in early July when I wrote several entries on HTML5 and XHTML2. If I made it then it could be considered prophetic, though it would only show a Nostradamus-style prophetic ability ("there will become a war, and in that war some people will suffer badly"). I lost that opportunity, but if something is worth doing, it is worth doing very, very slowly. And trust me, there will become a war, and in that war some people will suffer badly.

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Minimal markup seen from a data point of view rather than a document point of view.

I wouldn't say it is XML's fault as such, but it being used for a purpose it is less than ideally suited for, a consequence of early oversell (those who remember 2000 would know what I talk about).

There is another lesson that is web-relevant. Big dataset like these shouldn't be naively be tagged into an XML format and presented as is on the Web. This is because in a web setting the overhead for each element is rather large as the DOM will be applied to it, allowing arbitrary dynamic mutations. It is easy to overwhelm even the most powerful processor this way and zap all available memory.

I have earlier proclaimed markup an [necessary] evil. A more constructive way of putting it is to say that markup should always be minimal. You should use as much markup as you need, and no more. Markup is something we add to aid machines. Too much or wrong markup can do more damage as too little or too vague.

This design principle determines how to standardize markup. Unless the author knows something the user doesn't, the markup should not be there.

This principle obviously caters to the author's laziness, the admirable human trait not to do more than necessary. It is less obvious, but no less important, that it also empowers the user. More minimal markup means more flexible and accessible markup, assuming that the user agents do their job and actually act on their users' behalf.

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More musings on manned and machine space travel in Travel to Mars? I hope not.

Well over four years ago Opera made the first native SVG implementation, with the first useful implementation the following year, and Safari and Mozilla got into the game. By 2007 SVG became a browser business and earlier limited use of SVG faded into the background. Roughly at the same time Safari came up with Canvas. Then as now SVG was commonly seen as the more conscientious but awkward elder brother of Canvas.

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One common situation when registering a new account with a service (say my.opera.com) is that it requires email confirmation from you to activate that account. This is part of a handshake, where both parties present their credentials and confirm who the other one is. It is also a neat way for the service to make sure that the user has a valid email (to be blocked if a troll or spammer) which is also a universally unique identification. Two independent parties will never have the same email address while they could have the same username on different services (I am "jax" here, but on other sites someone else could have taken that username).

Unfortunately as often as not the confirmation request message to make sure that the user is not a spammer will itself end up in the user's spam folder since the mail program or service can't know that the email isn't from a spammer.

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Following up the discussion on Accessible drag and drop using WAI-ARIA, I think HTML5 may be a huge win for accessibility. HTML4 was filled with good intentions, HTML5 should be filled with good implementations.

HTML4 became a W3C standard 11 years ago. By now we should have plenty of implementation experience with the standard, user agents, web developers, and authoring tools and what has actually made the Web more or less accessible. Ideally there should be an audit of all the HTML4 features for their impact on accessibility, whether they were designed for the purpose or not.

We also have extensive implementation experience. Accessibility was central to the design of Opera from the very beginning and part of the company culture, but that doesn't mean every initiative was a success. Other browsers and tool makers should have learned something the last decade as well. Accessibility enjoys considerable goodwill among developers, most want the Web to be accessible, but to turn good will into good products first we need to make the implicit knowledge explicit, what failed as much as what succeeded and why it failed.

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Even after the death-of-XHTML2, syntax debate still dominates the day. Here is my contribution.

The XML story

In the beginning was SGML. There is a lot to be said about SGML so I won't. HTML was specified to be an application of SGML, but that never happened in practice. Among browsers Opera kept the pretence of supporting SGML for the longest time, causing us a lot of trouble because Opera behaved differently from every other browser. DocBook is another known SGML application, but in general SGML was no success.

About a decade ago a small group of people started a reformulation of the old SGML standard, First they did it outside of the W3C and later, when the success became apparent, within the W3C. The story of this simplified SGML, now known as XML, may be best told via the annotated XML, by Tim Bray, one of the principal authors. Essentially XML is angle brackets and a number of production rules on top of Unicode (for a fuller description see Comparison of SGML and XML).

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Should-read article: Accessible drag and drop using WAI-ARIA

The keyboard-friendly design of Opera was one of the things that attracted me to the browser in the first place, and one I am disappointed with the slow progress with. Keyboard-wise Opera today isn't substantially better today than Opera 3, or at least Opera 7. In some cases it is better (like spatial navigation when it works), in other cases it is worse (I still haven't found how to recover the Alt+Z history view, one of Opera's greatest inventions). I don't think Opera does any keyboard-only or keyboard-augmented usability testing.

Opera's lack of progress is one thing, but in the Web sphere things are actually getting worse. Early on you could do keyboard-only browsing most of the time. If the site used frames it was very awkward and it was better to use any mousing device available, and you had the occasional idiot who used 'onclick' functionality to recreate actual links, either because he didn't like the colour or underline of links or simply because he could.

Most of those idiots have discovered CSS by now (there should be a Hall of Shame site for those who haven't), but in these webapp ajax gidget 2.0 days recreating the user interface is the game of the day, and that usually means breaking the keyboard.

One of the tasks you can't reliably do with the keyboard today is drag and drop, and that goes for navigating to dynamically generated submenus and choices as well.

In my view the raging accessibility question shouldn't be whether the 'alt' attribute is optional or mandatory, but how we can make the Facebooks of the future accessible.

This ties in with HTML5 and the obituaries over the dead discontinued XHTML2 spec. XHTML2 and XForms were designed with accessibility in mind, HTML5 was designed primarily with web designers in mind. For a devoted keyboard user that should make the preference easy, right? Not so. The HTML4 spec, like XHTML2 and XForms, is filled with well-intentioned accessibility features, but those features are no good if they are not used.

An attribute like 'longdesc' can make an inaccessible picture into a device-independent and accessible textual representation of that picture. All the designer has to do is to spend a couple hours for each picture describing them in detail what they depict and what they are used for in an as context-independent way as possible. For some reason most web designers opt not to do that.

Given the choice between having Facebook and similar sites mostly usable or the WAI site and a couple other special interest sites perfectly accessibly marked up, Facebook is the winner. If the spec can give designers the features they crave and then behind the scenes give the browser or the assistive tool the information they need to cater to their users we have a winner. The HTML5 work with drag and drop looks very promising in this regard.

What the HTML5 spec doesn't cover, and which Opera has struggled with in its extensive keyboard support, is how to handle the conflicting interests of the web application developer and the user agent, be it a browser and/or assistive tool. As an example Opera uses the A key to navigate to the next link, what if that key is used by the application? In a keyboard not having the A key another key is used instead, or the user can configure his own keyboard mapping, so it wouldn't make sense to make a collection including A "reserved key" unavailable for the application. So who should win in a battle of A, the web application or the user agent? CSS has covered a similar conflict in the Cascade (the C in CSS), essentially default < author preferences < user-important preferences. For a User Agent I believe the best option is to let the UI be overridden by the web application (otherwise the application won't work in that environment) but have a mechanism to override the application when needed.

Related, given the great variety of keyboards, some user mechanism to remap keyboard mappings is necessary not only for the user agent, but for the web application as well.


Here is a demo of keyboard-accessible drag and drop in action.