Web Morphology

[The first in a series of posts on the tools of the Internet.]

My short (5 year) history in UI design and development has been primarily on the Flash Platform, specifically for experience sites and web applications. Having been privy to the introduction of Canvas, and the soon-to-be addition of Audio and Video tags to HTML, as well as having the curse of being a life long learner, I have spent the last nine months looking more seriously at JQuery, boning up/using CSS3 and occasionally looking at Silverlight (will be doing that a lot more very soon), etc.

My 'mission statemen't for this series is that I believe a tool is a tool is a tool. There are different tools, and none greater than the next. The only fault someone can have is not having a direct, working knowledge of a tool and then holding and proliferating an unfounded opinion about said tool. It is a professionals duty to understand the how and the why of the tools at their disposal, in my case for developing User Interface and thus User Experience.

Some tools I want to explore are: Browsers, Flash Platform, HTML5, CSS3, JQuery, JS, Silverlight, to name a few. I also want to explore some of the deterministic factors of how we go to where we are.

So, that being said, my first stop is at the fabulous United Nations of the Web, the W3C.

The W3C is the multinational group that decides the aesthetic fate of the web, in that they decide what goes in, what gets modified, what gets deprecated, etc.

The methodology for deciding what is as follows (via Wikipedia):

In accord with the W3C Process Document, a Recommendation progresses through five maturity levels:

- Working Draft (WD)
- Last Call Working Draft
- Candidate Recommendation (CR)
- Proposed Recommendation (PR)
- W3C Recommendation (REC)

They split up the reach into the following umbrellas: Web for All (Accessability), Web on Everything (if it's a device, it will access the web), Web of Consumers and Authors ( Web Design and Architectural Patterns, Applicaitons), Web of Data and Services (XML, Semantic, REST), Web of Trust (Privacy, Security). Awesome! They sound like some very intelligent and thoughtful people. Almost romantic.

There obviously needs to be some dirt to dig up, so I fire up 'trusted wikipedia' and start there. Ah, there it is, bullet 5, "Criticism". I guess when you have a group making difficult, far-reaching decisions, there are bound to be some nay-sayers.

On of the bullets, the "Domination by Large Organizations", is rather interesting as it implies that a great deal of the decision making process is influenced by the large corporate constituency, as stated here by Edd Dumbill ( editor of XML.com ): "I think developers are being poorly served by the fact that the big companies have dominated the work of the W3C over the last year. The W3C does more or less what its members tell it to." Sounds a little ambiguous, but I think a tangible example would be the push for what protocol / codec etc. type, say, the tag will use in HTML5. The company that owns that codec stands to either get a lot of money or a lot of influence if everyone starts using it. Now it starts to make more sense! It seems as if corporations play the role of lobbyists in the W3C. Interesting...

Also found via the wikipedia article, Joe Clark has some pretty interesting stuff to say on his criticism on the WCAG 2.0 ( Web Content Accessibility Guidelines ), which was ratified ( is that what you call it? ) in 2006. Hopefully the process has gotten better, but I highly doubt it.

Top 5:

5. Too Dense. To quote Joe Clark "When compared against typical page dimensions in books, the three WCAG 2 documents, at 450 pages, exceed the size of each of the books published on the topic of WCAG 1, including mine".

4. Process Is Not Easily Accessible. "After working on WCAG 2 for five years, WAI gave the entire industry and all interested parties, including people with disabilities, a whopping 34 days to comment on WCAG 2"- J.C.

3. If You Don't Speak English And/Or Have A Disability, You Are Not Involved. "The WCAG development process is inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t speak English. More importantly, it’s inaccessible to some people with disabilities, notably anyone with a reading disability (who must wade through ill-written standards documents and e-mails— there’s already been a complaint) and anyone who’s deaf (who must listen to conference calls). Almost nobody with a learning disability or hearing impairment contributes to the process—because, in practical terms, they can’t." - J.C.

2. Sometimes Weird and Convoluted. "Your page, or any part of it, may blink for up to three seconds. Parts of it may not, however, “flash.” " - J.C.

1. WTF? - "WCAG 1 had three levels of “conformance,” which, in typical WAI style, were given a total of six names—Priority 1/Level A, Priority 2/Level AA (annoyingly written as “Double-A” to get around faulty screen-reader pronunciation), and Priority 3/Level AAA (“Triple- A”)." - J.C.

Bonus Round : Good Thing The Web Is Not About Multi-Media - WHOOPS! "For a deaf or a blind person who wants to understand multimedia, WCAG 2 offers no real improvement." - J.C.

Feel free to check out the rest here

Well... to be fair, as I said previously, there will always be nay- sayers, but at the same time, it does seem like less romantic, more realistic view of the way things are over there. In summary, there are two sides to every story, and there is an amount of influence this body has on implementation of new ways of communication, and like any group of humans, they are prone to mistake, design by committee, and instances of over thinking things to the point of convolution. Fair enough.

Next article, I want to explore what work the "OPEN WEB" movement has performed in helping fix these foibles.