I use Bobby to test my site for content accessibility and made changes to as many pages on my site as possible in order to get almost every page to meet section 508 and/or WCAG Level A (or level 1).
I hope you are not relying on the results of Bobby (or any automated accessibility checker) as the signal of compliance. It cannot be totally done automatically. For instance, the WCAG says that images must have meaningful alt attributes. A script can check that an alt attribute exists, but there's no way for it to tell whether the alt attribute is meaningful -- that can only be done by the web designer.
Please don't think that passing a Bobby test is proof of an accessible website. You must realise the limitations of automation here.
The page is accessible if it can be properly viewed and navigated using a text-based browser (i.e. Lynx).
A good start, but not strictly true. Lynx is a full-screen text browser, so you get a page by page view of a document. A better test would either be a line-mode browser (like the original W3 browser), or a speech browser like IBM's Homepage Reader.
Apparently the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) have accessibility packs that includes a blindfold.
Not the first time IDSA has had a go at organisations legitimately distributing Spectrum games.
When Sinclair User brought out the MegaTapes, the first couple of tapes had some decent stuff, games no longer available for resale. Then IDSA stepped in and complained that it was preventing people from buying newer games, which had the effect of turning the MegaTapes into a demo/reader written game range.
Here's a simple logical proof that a "perfect" chess playing computer can't be made though ( perfect being defined as it wins every game whether it plays black or white). If it played itself, one of it could only draw at best, since, by the rules, there cannot be two winners.
There's a flaw here.
A perfect chess playing computer would play the best move at evey node within a game. Pitting a perfect computer against a perfect computer, if its draw, then chess games should always draw. If one side wins, then chess is a winnable game for one side.
Perfect computers can only play the best move within the rules of the game. This does not mean a perfect computer can win an unwinnable game, only put up the best possible defence it can under the rules. The perfect computer is constrained by the rules when calculating its move.
however, back in the real world (you know, the one where Disney and MS Frontpage are responsible for web pages), you can count the number of web pages that use the HTML as a markup language on one hand.
Which is exactly why search engine techniques haven't evolved into something more powerful than token analysis of plain text files. There's not much difference between a search engine and grep really. Search engines just present the results as a web page.
You make some excellent points that I fully agree with. The only comment I can add any additional input to is:
but XML is certainly not something that search engines will be able to parse. You can make up your own tags for crying out loud! They won't know what to do with my custom XML tag: <customer-sucess-story>, but they'll know what to do once it's translated into <h2 style="customer-success">... they know that h2 is a header, therefore important, and the data in there is more important than what I have in my <span> most likely.
XML is not totally a lost cause for search engines. Using semantic-tools such as ontologies, you could specify that when I say <customer-success-story>, that's the same meaning as <business-benefits-in-pratice> that Jim uses. By linking "synonyms" of semantic groupings a search engine can make sense and good use of these relationships.
RSS is probably the most used XML application out there, although there are a few differences in Dave Winer's "Really Simple Syndication" and the more adaptable RDF Site Summary, using ontologies to link which elements are semantically equivalent this boils the XML flexibility into something equivalent to dialects.
kinda says something about the laughable state of search engine technology before google, don't it?
Google have a top-notch system but the whole indexing thing is still laughable. They are not really taking advantage of structured markup in evaluating keywords - they extract the same information as if it were a plain text file sans markup. Yeah, sometimes top-level headers and link text is used, but that's it really.
Its good, however, to see that Google aren't resting on their laurels, as Google Labs amply demonstrate. I like Google sets, which makes good use of list markup, like when the shuttle crashed last week I was trying to remember the names of all the space shuttles, so entering Colombia, Challenger and Enterprise into Google Sets gave me the names of the other three shuttles, Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis -- a useful tool indeed.
Considering Google's purchase of Blogger announced this past weekend, I'm looking forward to more semantically based search abilities - since blogs are by their nature very structured (especially those with RSS or XML feeds).
He [Miguel] seems to betting on the success of.NET.
Mono neither a bet nor a gamble. As laid out quite clearly in their FAQ (you have read it, right?) Mono is an implementation of a CLR, so allowing the construction of applications written in many different languages. A much cleaner framework than the current Gnome implementation.
Whether.net succeeds or fails is irrelevant to mono as an open source application framework. Microsoft's.net could go down the pipe and cast aside as useless. This does not hinder mono as an open source framework for applications.
Wouldn't the Mono project constitute as prior art?
No. Mono is an implementation of the CLR as documented in the ECMA published standards. It is not an implementation of web services on top of.net - which is what the patent application is about.
thats where miguel has gone wrong. you should not be investing in a project that relies on the continued good will of MS.
1.) Mono is an implementation of the standards published by Ecma 2.) The patents in the article refer to distributed computing and web services on top of the.net platform 3.) Mono is an implementation of the standards published by Ecma 4.) Ecma published standard does not include the webservices and remote method invocation APIs built on top of.net 5.) Mono is an implementation of the standards published by Ecma
At which point are you going to get it (or how about reading the articles before opening the void?)
It is Microsoft's website afterall. Who says it has to work with other companies browsers?
How can you call it a website if it doesn't work on the Web. I haven't seen an official definition of the World Wide Web that indicates what browsers are allowed and what browsers aren't allowed. Care to shed a light on a reference of this nature?
Now if someone can't author a website properly, calling it a website could be misrepresentative. Why not call it an IEsite, not a website - since it fails to meet the requirements of a website.
Well its a little difficult to validate a website that doesn't mention what DocType it supposedly adheres to. From MSn home page considering the namespace attribute on the html element, and the numerous <br/>, that would suggest they are trying to author XHTML. Lets be generous and pretend its XHTML Transitional:
W3C Validation of msn.com: Quite a stackload of errors there. And most certainly not standards compliant HTML. Now if the HTML fails a validation check, there's not much use in validating the CSS. That be asking a lawyer a question while his brain is in a jar of some professors laborators in New York while his body is buried somewhere on the west coast.
I don't know where you got this myopic view of the Web from, but it is certainly trollish from a standards POV. Obviously the technique of augmentative authoring has eluded you.
If you are creating multiple copies of resources for different user agent strings, then it is a prime indication you haven't understood the very simple concept of the World Wide Web.
For various reasons ( including access to the reading disabled) every site should, at the very least, serve a different page to pure text browsers than it does to graphical browsers.
Making a website accessible does not mean text-only. This is a myth, and a badly misinformed piece of strawman fluff. Text-versions of websites should only be a last resort, when you've reached the point where you admit your design and markup skills are inadequate to do even a competant job, let alone a good one. Accessible websites can also be well designed, there's no mutual exclusivity.
The whole *point* of identifying browsers at all is to allow the server to serve optimized pages for different browsers.
If you so strongly want to believe this nonsense, please post a reference to either a standard or recommendation that states that User-Agent is a mandatory HTTP parameter. You know as well as I do that User-Agent strings are optional, and relying on them to determine presentation is so typically short-sighted that its now laughable.
You cannot succeed over the medium to long term adopting a browser-sniff route. It is folly.
A few weeks ago the Scunthorpe town council decided to implement a nasty words filter on all email received, just to reduce the volume of abusive email they were receiving.
The email filter worked out very well indeed - well, too well. Absolutely no mail was delivered. It took a while for them to realise that their own town name contained one particular rude word, and considering that their town name was part of their email address, all email had to have a certain word in it.
since i'm lazy, i'll just link this [c2.com] article.
So because you are lazy, you are giving me information about a website that gives me information about why metadata is a myth. How ironic.
You may actually want to read the info for yourself. Especially the first three lines:
"some system components never designed/developed to work together" -- the Semantic Web components are designed to work together. So that myth is firmly irrelevant.
The second seems to be more to do with Web Services than the Semantic Web, again irrelevant.
The hype about the Semantic Web always ends up promising "and then we'll be able to make everything interoperate"
Then stop listening to hype and look at the real thing. The Semantic Web _allows_ people who want information to interoperate to do so using a collection of standardised tools and languages. People will decide whether they want to interoperate or not.
I'm sceptical, based on my background in AI
And there is the problem. The Semantic Web is not a full AI system - never was it intended to be one. If you are looking at the Semantic Web as a complete solution to AI, it will disappoint you. Its obviously not a tool you'd be interested in using. Its not AI and it never has been.
The Semantic Web is about information sharing, not decision making.
As far as I am concerned, a patient's address is part of the data being held by the American health care. Addresses can translate into GPS coordinates - the means to do this are already available. Rivers can translate into a series of GPS coordinates (not terribly difficult with satellites orbiting overhead mapping the terrain) defining its progress from its source to its destination. Areas of forests and vegetation similarly can be mapped into an area defined by a set of GPS coordinates - again not terribly difficult.
GPS is the commonality between these three independant data sources, so useful information as described by the article can be made into reasonable conclusions with a little programmatic logic. Heck, it can even be rendered visually, which will ease the human identification of disease trends to the human eye.
Economic Data on local industries. Local would immediately infer an area nearby - this again can be mapped into an area of lines defined by GPS coordinates. This too can be used above.
Local production, equally. Factories have addresses and physical locations. Routes taken by delivery vehicles can be mapped out. All of it can be mapped to meaningful GPS coordinates, and all can play a factor in determining the cause and spread of a virus or infection.
All this then boils down to a well defined problem of intersecting lines, which is solvable.
There's your "meaningful compatible" data - physical locations and GPS coordinates. I doubt continental drift is going to throw such a large spanner in the works considering this is about homes, forests and rivers and within someone's lifetime.
It really doesn't take a genius to take two vocabularies and map out what's the same. Translators have been doing this for centuries. That's what helps people talking different languages come to a common understanding. Not everyone on this planet speaks English, a clear indication that forcing one vocabulary isn't required.
I repeat: I'll believe it when I hear that Cyc is being used as a web indexing tool.
And exactly how is Cyc going to make the correct conclusions with obviously bad information any better than people who know the data they are sharing? Garbage in Garbage out - that's all Cyc will understand when its released to surf the dregs on of the Web.
If you think the Semantic Web is supposed to be the complete answer for Artificial Intelligence - you really haven't been paying much attention.
(Interesting that the first link is virutally metadata about why metadata won't work, since it only links to offsite pages covering the very topic - quite a contradiction)
It may actually help to be able to tell the difference between meta data and meta tags. That crosses off well over half the arguments raised in the two links above.
If the basis of the argument is that average people are lazy/stupid and average people can't do XML, then the simple answer is good - that would mean above-average people will do it, since they'd be neither lazy nor stupid. Logically, that will probably do a lot more to promote the benefits and the quality of the Semantic Web than have some stupid Joe ballsing it up.
As an analogy, that's probably why Yahoo and ODP are the top directory based websites on the planet - and why "recommend your own website" based FFA sites get absolutely nowhere. The triumph of intelligence and activity over stupidness and laziness.
the internet contains far too much noise to ever get the kind of signal that Tim Berners-Lee is talking about.
I see the Semantic Web as starting off small and growing as more and more vocabularies, ontologies and topic maps become available. So it won't span the entire WWW initially. Initially the filtering will be a natural result of scope. And the content that will pass through the filters will typically be much higher signal than noise.
I don't see S/N to be a problem in an environment that evolves rather than revolutionises. If there is a demand for a certain ontology, someone interested in seeing that ontology will build it. The same dynamics that makes the Web as big as it is today - starting from a small base.
XML is text markup, it is not a generic data model.
No-one would dare suggest that XML is a way of storing data. XML is a way of sharing information, not storage.
If one wants to make data available to computers, data must be in an accessible relational database system under an agreed-upon, domain-specific data model.
I certainly don't agree that data _must_ _be_ in a relational database to make it available to computers. Why limit data expression only to those realms that can be expressed in a tabular fashion?
Your subject, and your refutation of it certainly strikes me as a case of Mr Pot calling Mr Kettle black.
And so what if XML and RDF will lead to some more structured data out there -- and are we really supposed to believe this?
Believe what you wish, whether it is contrary to current practise or not. XML and RDF allow people to structure their content far better than alternatives, with less effort. Unless you have a better and more accessible way - why not mention it now, I'm interested in hearing about it.
What does it matter if you still have to write some kind of software to display or do stuff with that data?
There is no "still have to write". That's the beauty of XML based languages. You _don't_ have to write your own parser or renderer. These generic tools are already available and in use now.
There are exciting applications for semantic nets, agents, personal search engines, classifiers, whatever, but so far no one has done anything interesting with the technology for us end users.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you are not relying on the results of Bobby (or any automated accessibility checker) as the signal of compliance. It cannot be totally done automatically. For instance, the WCAG says that images must have meaningful alt attributes. A script can check that an alt attribute exists, but there's no way for it to tell whether the alt attribute is meaningful -- that can only be done by the web designer.
Please don't think that passing a Bobby test is proof of an accessible website. You must realise the limitations of automation here.
A good start, but not strictly true. Lynx is a full-screen text browser, so you get a page by page view of a document. A better test would either be a line-mode browser (like the original W3 browser), or a speech browser like IBM's Homepage Reader.
Apparently the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) have accessibility packs that includes a blindfold.
Obviously not website designers, that's why governments around the world feel compelled to legislate website designers into doing the right thing.
As Joe Clark points out, if you are making your website accessible because of legislation, then you are doing the right things for the wrong reasons.
To pre-empt the "its only government sites that need to be accessible" crowd, here's a counter-argument to the South Western misruling.
Someone else opts you in
That probably explains why they haven't found a thing yet, except for a sighting of Elvis in Tescos.
Not the first time IDSA has had a go at organisations legitimately distributing Spectrum games.
When Sinclair User brought out the MegaTapes, the first couple of tapes had some decent stuff, games no longer available for resale. Then IDSA stepped in and complained that it was preventing people from buying newer games, which had the effect of turning the MegaTapes into a demo/reader written game range.
There's a flaw here.
A perfect chess playing computer would play the best move at evey node within a game. Pitting a perfect computer against a perfect computer, if its draw, then chess games should always draw. If one side wins, then chess is a winnable game for one side.
Perfect computers can only play the best move within the rules of the game. This does not mean a perfect computer can win an unwinnable game, only put up the best possible defence it can under the rules. The perfect computer is constrained by the rules when calculating its move.
Which is exactly why search engine techniques haven't evolved into something more powerful than token analysis of plain text files. There's not much difference between a search engine and grep really. Search engines just present the results as a web page.
Only Google Labs seems to be the exception here.
XML is not totally a lost cause for search engines. Using semantic-tools such as ontologies, you could specify that when I say <customer-success-story>, that's the same meaning as <business-benefits-in-pratice> that Jim uses. By linking "synonyms" of semantic groupings a search engine can make sense and good use of these relationships.
RSS is probably the most used XML application out there, although there are a few differences in Dave Winer's "Really Simple Syndication" and the more adaptable RDF Site Summary, using ontologies to link which elements are semantically equivalent this boils the XML flexibility into something equivalent to dialects.
Google have a top-notch system but the whole indexing thing is still laughable. They are not really taking advantage of structured markup in evaluating keywords - they extract the same information as if it were a plain text file sans markup. Yeah, sometimes top-level headers and link text is used, but that's it really.
Its good, however, to see that Google aren't resting on their laurels, as Google Labs amply demonstrate. I like Google sets, which makes good use of list markup, like when the shuttle crashed last week I was trying to remember the names of all the space shuttles, so entering Colombia, Challenger and Enterprise into Google Sets gave me the names of the other three shuttles, Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis -- a useful tool indeed.
Considering Google's purchase of Blogger announced this past weekend, I'm looking forward to more semantically based search abilities - since blogs are by their nature very structured (especially those with RSS or XML feeds).
Mono neither a bet nor a gamble. As laid out quite clearly in their FAQ (you have read it, right?) Mono is an implementation of a CLR, so allowing the construction of applications written in many different languages. A much cleaner framework than the current Gnome implementation.
Whether
No. Mono is an implementation of the CLR as documented in the ECMA published standards. It is not an implementation of web services on top of
1.) Mono is an implementation of the standards published by Ecma
2.) The patents in the article refer to distributed computing and web services on top of the
3.) Mono is an implementation of the standards published by Ecma
4.) Ecma published standard does not include the webservices and remote method invocation APIs built on top of
5.) Mono is an implementation of the standards published by Ecma
At which point are you going to get it (or how about reading the articles before opening the void?)
Try a 2 celled Excel spreadsheet, the left cell with a picture, and the right with a short bit of text. That's horrendous.
Although, believe it or not, not as bad as MSPublisher.
How can you call it a website if it doesn't work on the Web. I haven't seen an official definition of the World Wide Web that indicates what browsers are allowed and what browsers aren't allowed. Care to shed a light on a reference of this nature?
Now if someone can't author a website properly, calling it a website could be misrepresentative. Why not call it an IEsite, not a website - since it fails to meet the requirements of a website.
Well its a little difficult to validate a website that doesn't mention what DocType it supposedly adheres to. From MSn home page considering the namespace attribute on the html element, and the numerous <br />, that would suggest they are trying to author XHTML. Lets be generous and pretend its XHTML Transitional:
W3C Validation of msn.com: Quite a stackload of errors there. And most certainly not standards compliant HTML. Now if the HTML fails a validation check, there's not much use in validating the CSS. That be asking a lawyer a question while his brain is in a jar of some professors laborators in New York while his body is buried somewhere on the west coast.
If you are creating multiple copies of resources for different user agent strings, then it is a prime indication you haven't understood the very simple concept of the World Wide Web.
Making a website accessible does not mean text-only. This is a myth, and a badly misinformed piece of strawman fluff. Text-versions of websites should only be a last resort, when you've reached the point where you admit your design and markup skills are inadequate to do even a competant job, let alone a good one. Accessible websites can also be well designed, there's no mutual exclusivity.
If you so strongly want to believe this nonsense, please post a reference to either a standard or recommendation that states that User-Agent is a mandatory HTTP parameter. You know as well as I do that User-Agent strings are optional, and relying on them to determine presentation is so typically short-sighted that its now laughable.
You cannot succeed over the medium to long term adopting a browser-sniff route. It is folly.
A few weeks ago the Scunthorpe town council decided to implement a nasty words filter on all email received, just to reduce the volume of abusive email they were receiving.
The email filter worked out very well indeed - well, too well. Absolutely no mail was delivered. It took a while for them to realise that their own town name contained one particular rude word, and considering that their town name was part of their email address, all email had to have a certain word in it.
So because you are lazy, you are giving me information about a website that gives me information about why metadata is a myth. How ironic.
You may actually want to read the info for yourself. Especially the first three lines:
"some system components never designed/developed to work together" -- the Semantic Web components are designed to work together. So that myth is firmly irrelevant.
The second seems to be more to do with Web Services than the Semantic Web, again irrelevant.
Then stop listening to hype and look at the real thing. The Semantic Web _allows_ people who want information to interoperate to do so using a collection of standardised tools and languages. People will decide whether they want to interoperate or not.
And there is the problem. The Semantic Web is not a full AI system - never was it intended to be one. If you are looking at the Semantic Web as a complete solution to AI, it will disappoint you. Its obviously not a tool you'd be interested in using. Its not AI and it never has been.
The Semantic Web is about information sharing, not decision making.
As far as I am concerned, a patient's address is part of the data being held by the American health care. Addresses can translate into GPS coordinates - the means to do this are already available. Rivers can translate into a series of GPS coordinates (not terribly difficult with satellites orbiting overhead mapping the terrain) defining its progress from its source to its destination. Areas of forests and vegetation similarly can be mapped into an area defined by a set of GPS coordinates - again not terribly difficult.
GPS is the commonality between these three independant data sources, so useful information as described by the article can be made into reasonable conclusions with a little programmatic logic. Heck, it can even be rendered visually, which will ease the human identification of disease trends to the human eye.
Economic Data on local industries. Local would immediately infer an area nearby - this again can be mapped into an area of lines defined by GPS coordinates. This too can be used above.
Local production, equally. Factories have addresses and physical locations. Routes taken by delivery vehicles can be mapped out. All of it can be mapped to meaningful GPS coordinates, and all can play a factor in determining the cause and spread of a virus or infection.
All this then boils down to a well defined problem of intersecting lines, which is solvable.
There's your "meaningful compatible" data - physical locations and GPS coordinates. I doubt continental drift is going to throw such a large spanner in the works considering this is about homes, forests and rivers and within someone's lifetime.
It really doesn't take a genius to take two vocabularies and map out what's the same. Translators have been doing this for centuries. That's what helps people talking different languages come to a common understanding. Not everyone on this planet speaks English, a clear indication that forcing one vocabulary isn't required.
And exactly how is Cyc going to make the correct conclusions with obviously bad information any better than people who know the data they are sharing? Garbage in Garbage out - that's all Cyc will understand when its released to surf the dregs on of the Web.
If you think the Semantic Web is supposed to be the complete answer for Artificial Intelligence - you really haven't been paying much attention.
(Interesting that the first link is virutally metadata about why metadata won't work, since it only links to offsite pages covering the very topic - quite a contradiction)
It may actually help to be able to tell the difference between meta data and meta tags. That crosses off well over half the arguments raised in the two links above.
If the basis of the argument is that average people are lazy/stupid and average people can't do XML, then the simple answer is good - that would mean above-average people will do it, since they'd be neither lazy nor stupid. Logically, that will probably do a lot more to promote the benefits and the quality of the Semantic Web than have some stupid Joe ballsing it up.
As an analogy, that's probably why Yahoo and ODP are the top directory based websites on the planet - and why "recommend your own website" based FFA sites get absolutely nowhere. The triumph of intelligence and activity over stupidness and laziness.
I see the Semantic Web as starting off small and growing as more and more vocabularies, ontologies and topic maps become available. So it won't span the entire WWW initially. Initially the filtering will be a natural result of scope. And the content that will pass through the filters will typically be much higher signal than noise.
I don't see S/N to be a problem in an environment that evolves rather than revolutionises. If there is a demand for a certain ontology, someone interested in seeing that ontology will build it. The same dynamics that makes the Web as big as it is today - starting from a small base.
No-one would dare suggest that XML is a way of storing data. XML is a way of sharing information, not storage.
I certainly don't agree that data _must_ _be_ in a relational database to make it available to computers. Why limit data expression only to those realms that can be expressed in a tabular fashion?
Your subject, and your refutation of it certainly strikes me as a case of Mr Pot calling Mr Kettle black.
Believe what you wish, whether it is contrary to current practise or not. XML and RDF allow people to structure their content far better than alternatives, with less effort. Unless you have a better and more accessible way - why not mention it now, I'm interested in hearing about it.
There is no "still have to write". That's the beauty of XML based languages. You _don't_ have to write your own parser or renderer. These generic tools are already available and in use now.
Great, and your contribution to all this is....?