oedipus' online complexes

(or, i say banana, and you say orange...)
reflections on HTML5

just what you wanted, more navel gazing from a web wonk...

implementors cannot be the sole arbiters of what is and what isn't the best markup for a particular situation -- they are going to pick and choose what they believe their market share wants supported and will develop to that pre-conception, not to the actual technical recommendation -- otherwise, all of this would be moot -- if everyone implemented the same DOM in the same manner, as specified by W3C technical recommendations, then assistive technologies would be able to present a consistent user experience between user agents, but due to implementation decisions forced upon users by implementors, assistive technologies are forced to choose to which implementation of a technical recommendation to which to tailor their assistive technology, which undermines the whole point of standards harmonization, which is the basis of interoperability and a cornerstone of accessibility...

specification writing fora can define all the mechanisms one could want, but the reality is that implementors are going to pick and choose what they want to implement and the manner in which they implement what they have chosen to implement, all of which constrains the user experience, as assistive technologies then need to tailor their implementations not to a clearly specified technical recommendation, but to each individual implementor's interpretation and implementation of the technical recommendation, which, in turn, constrains what assistive technologies can and cannot support...

this is the tail wagging the dog -- a situation which reminds me of an oft-misattributed quote that "freedom of the press applies only to those who own one" -- HTML and other markup languages are developed for end users and not for implementors alone; to give the proprietary decisions of implementors more weight then the actual needs of individual users is a skewed approach to specification writing -- the point of a forum such as the W3C is to ensure that there is a standard, well-defined means of implementing features and mechanisms that allows for free expression of an implementor's imagination in the implementation details, but which must not override the end-user's ability to fully realize the potential specified by a technical recommendation...

the market hasn't spoken -- rather, it has only selectively listened to users' requests and needs... how can the market speak, when there are so very few voices that carry any weight? this is trickle-down development, rather than bottom up development, which provides a far more stable foundation upon which to build then the ever-shifting sands of the nebulous "market"

specification writing isn't -- nor should it be -- a popularity contest, but that is what it has been reduced to by the trickle-down approach to implementation and development; are the "big 4" really reacting to user requests and preferences, or are they merely providing users with an artificially limited set of options?

implementors are constantly asking for users to justify their concerns and use cases -- where is the "proof" that what crude tools we have at our disposal are the products of user-driven demand, rather than the product of convenience and perceived market-advantage on the part of implementors?

there are three layers of users being addressed by HTML5: developers, implementors/authors and end-users, and end-user concerns must be accorded the bang important in this cascade -- not the artificial marketplace created by individual developers which limits the choices available to implementors/authors, and hence compromises the user's ability to utilize the native mechanisms of a markup language, due to the restraints imposed upon the user by developers and implementors...