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	<title>isolani: weblog</title>
	<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/" />
	<modified>2008-06-08T05:17-05:00</modified>
	<author>
		<name>Isofarro</name>
	
	</author>

	<!-- optional elements of feed -->
	<tagline>isolani: blogging about web standards, accessibility, semantic web, intelligent agents, gadgets and web development</tagline>

	<entry>
		<title>Ubuntu after a month</title>
		<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/stuff/UbuntuAfterAMonth" />
		<id>http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog.stuff.UbuntuAfterAMonth</id>
		<issued>2008-06-08T05:17-05:00</issued>
		<modified>2008-06-08T05:17-05:00</modified>
		
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<p>I've been using Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 as the operating system on my <a href="http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/stuff/MakeOrBreakWithUbuntu">main home laptop for over a month</a> now. Windows XP having decided that it didn't want to play nicely anymore. I had a few little issues at the start, but I'm starting to make progress.</p>

<h3>The Firefox problems</h3>

<p>I missed my del.icio.us toolbar and, praise Murphy, days after I complained, a <a href="http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2008/04/firefox-3-delicious-and-you.html
">Firefox 3 version of the Del.icio.us toolbar</a> was released, and I'm satisfied again. (Thanks for the tip, <a href="http://marcust.com/">MarkusT</a>.)</p>

<p>There's one quirky issue with the del.icio.us dialogue, the Save button disappears off the screen. I think this is happening because I have a load of network contacts which pushes the Save button outside the view area.</p>

<p>I figured out the random effects of right clicking links in Firefox. I was seeing odd behaviour like right clicking a link either opening an 'Add bookmarks' dialog, or open Firebug's Inspect element, or open a new window. It's a timing issue.</p>

<p>There's a noticeable delay in the context menu appearing, and by the time it appears the mouse-button is already released, and the default option highlighted depends on where the context menu appears. Since the mouse-button has been released, it takes the highlighted option. Unfortunately, since the initial highlighted option differs depending on how the context menu is rendered, that's the basis of the seemingly random behaviour of right clicking a link.</p>

<p>The simple solution is to hold down the right mouse-button until the context menu appears, and then select the desired option, and then release the mouse button.</p>

<h3>Twitter</h3>

<p>I was experiencing performance problems with Twitter's web interface, so I decided to co-opt a Twitter client. One of the options from the Ubuntu Application Installer is Twitux. I've been running that for the last six weeks and I'm fairly pleased with that.</p>

<p>Except that I'd prefer my direct messages to be much more intuitively reachable that choosing between direct messages or friend tweets. I want both, preferably in a tab pane.</p>

<h3>Knowledge gathering</h3>

<p>I used to use Dave Winer's OPML Editor to keep track of ideas and notes, and I've struggled to find an adequate replacement. None of the hierarchical editors available on Linux offered anything close to the editing fluency of the OPML editor. I tried NoteCase, briefly touched on <a href="http://outliners.expandingbrain.com/doku.php?id=vimoutliner">Vim Outliner</a> and the console-only <a href="http://hnb.sourceforge.net/">hnb</a>.</p>

<p>I found an application that works for me, and it surprised me. I tried Tomboy and I've been hooked on it ever since. So hooked that I'm looking forward to seeing a Windows version appearing so I can use it in work.</p>

<p>Tomboy is a fantastic piece of software, it goes well beyond a Sticky note application, and when using lists it decently mimics outlining. Tomboy is like a desktop wiki, but far far better than the Windows alternatives I tried out over 18 months ago.</p>

<p>The key features of Tomboy are:</p>

<ul>
	<li>persistent saving, so no need to manually save anything</li>
	<li>a wiki-like way of adding new pages</li>
	<li>multiple notebooks, so its straightforward to keep disparate subject matter separate, but still be able to link from one to the other</li>
	<li>In list mode the editing style is outliner-like, which fits nicely in how I think and write</li>
</ul>

<p>Tomboy is, for me, a killer application on Ubuntu, an application that is better than anything on Windows. It just works, and it's a very nice user experience.</p>

<h3>Chess</h3>

<p>The key friction point of migrating from Windows was the loss of Chessbase tools. I've tried to use scid as a replacement, and although I'm finding some really nice features - like novelty search, tournament search, opening repertoire reviews; I'm suffering a little under the analysis modules. Although Crafty is a perfectly adequate chess engine, and there are others available, scid doesn't present the analysis as well as Shredder.</p>

<p>It's not that scid is unusable, it's that I have to change my expectations and just get over the fact that there's hardly any chess software on the market that is as usable and as user-friendly and as intuitive as Chessbase products.</p>

<p>I've been investigating on running Shredder on Ubuntu using Wine. I'm thinking about trying it. The suggested path is to install Shredder to a USB stick on a Windows machine, and then plug that USB stick into my Ubuntu machine.</p>

<p>To be fair, I've been using scid to review and blog about the Corus/Wijk aan Zee tournament. It's a heavy tournament of seven grandmaster games a day, the majority of games are hard-fought. It's the worst case scenario, but I did get through the analysis, it just wasn't as comfortable as I wanted.</p>

<p>I guess one of the downsides of scid is that its an older version that comes with Ubuntu's massive software library. Perhaps if I try to hand-install a more recent version, or ChessDB, then I can get over the perceived hardship I'm facing.</p>

<p>So I have options, which means I'm not in a dead end yet. Scid is adequate and interesting, just not as high quality as the Fritz chess interface.</p>

<h3>Plug and play</h3>

<p>I'm blown away by Ubuntu's seamless support of USB devices. My MP3 player which I use for listening to podcasts, needs a special driver in Windows XP. It just appears as a file system on my desktop, I just copy and delete files over to it as if it were just another directory.</p>

<p>Although, one little gotcha is that when you delete files from a USB stick, they don't get deleted immediately, so you don't see an immediate increase in space on the drive. The files are in a Deleted Items Folder, and once that is emptied, then the space becomes available for more data.</p>

<p>I used my digital camera (Nikon Coolpix 4600) yesterday taking loads of pictures at the Biggin Hill Air Show. I just plugged it into my laptop, and again, I had a simple directory structure so I could access all my pictures.</p>

<p>My various harddrive enclosures and USB sticks have all just worked after plugging it in. Only one failed, and I think that's because the drive itself is flaky, not a problem with Ubuntu itself.</p>


<h3>Uploading to Flickr</h3>

<p>The Flickr Desktop Organizer frustrated me quite a lot yesterday evening. It decided to synchronise with my current photos on Flickr, downloading my 1600+ images plus 30+ photo sets. Three hours later, it then crashed every time I tried to upload my new 120+ photos taken yesterday. Here is the first application I actually uninstalled in Ubuntu.</p>

<p>I took a step back and installed the Flickr Uploader which used the normal GNOME interface. This just worked, and allowed me to tag, title and describe loads of photos either all-at-once, in groups and individually. The upload took ages, but it was 84Mb, so that ran over night. And now I have my <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/isofarro/sets/72157605483346866/">Biggin Hill pictures</a> up on Flickr.</p>

<p>The F-Spot photo manager is a neat tool for viewing pictures. It's fullscreen mode is perfect for my simplistic needs.</p>

<h3>Developing</h3>

<p>I had a few issues with the graphical MySQL clients, but have now settled on the MySQL Query Browser which is similar to SQLYog.</p>

<p>Bluefish has become my main editing home, whether it's writing blogposts, JavaScript and PHP. It's good enough basis for text editing and my impression will probably improve as I understand more and more of the features the editor has to offer. I haven't found a way of running a PHP script I'm writing and pipe it's output to a tabbed window. Terminal is sufficient for the moment, since I can then take advantage of the shell to do better things.</p>

<h3>Next steps</h3>

<p>I want to figure out how to get Bluetooth working so I can transfer photos from my mobile phone (a Nokia 6233) up to Flickr. On this particular laptop I have a bluetooth USB device. It might just be as simple as plugging the USB widget in and get another file system view.</p>

<p>I need to experiment with chess software a bit more and find a more comfortable set of tools. The main difficulty is the lack of support of the new Chessbase cbh format (not the older cbf format) outside of chess tools. If I get Shredder running in Wine, this problem disappears. At the moment, I need a Windows machine to access the chess data I need, I can't entirely rely on one Ubuntu laptop yet.</p>

<p>Since I've found a one-to-one match with most Windows software and functionality, I'm in a position to consider what Ubuntu offers that's not available elsewhere. Tomboy is a fantastic example of the possibilities, and I'm looking forward to making better use of the Ubuntu desktop.</p>      
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	</entry>

	<entry>
		<title>The value of innovation</title>
		<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/web/TheValueOfInnovation" />
		<id>http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog.web.TheValueOfInnovation</id>
		<issued>2008-05-28T12:25-05:00</issued>
		<modified>2008-05-28T12:25-05:00</modified>
		
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<p>The value in innovation isn't in the actual innovation itself, it's in the opportunities that are created because of the innovation. An innovation in one area leads to competitive advantages in other areas.</p>

<p>Google is a fantastic example of the real benefits of innovation. Their 20% time allows their engineers time to contemplate what is wrong with the world, and fix them. As with typical startups, failure rate is high, but the payoff of one success can be substantial.</p>

<h3>Just another web-based email client</h3>

<p>Gmail is the predominant example of a 20% time idea making it into a real Google offering. It was innovative in taking a web-based email client and increasing the user experience to levels only seen in native desktop applications. It took advantage of Ajax to streamline the workflow of dealing with email, and succeeded exceptionally well.</p>

<p>Gmail isn't a leading web-based email client. The top dog is Yahoo! Mail. Gmail made Yahoo's offering look clunky and downright unusable. Yahoo's five year redevelopment of the acquired OddPost still hasn't caught up to the overall quality of Gmail.</p>

<p>And Gmail is eating into Yahoo! Mail's lead as more people flock to Google's services. Some of those people will be people looking for a better web-based email client, others will adopt Gmail because they are using other Google offerings more and more in their daily lives.</p>


<h3>Identity</h3>

<p>The value of Gmail doesn't stop there. Email is a personalised application, and so requires authentication and login, it requires identity. Gmail's login is now handled by Google Accounts, which is Google's application for managing customer identity.</p>

<p>A search engine doesn't need identity, so it seems odd for Google to build a dedicated service to deal with user account creation and authentication. But, this is an instrumental move from Google from just an anonymous public services into personalised experiences. Google have even used identity to enhance the hallowed ground of their own search.</p>

<h3>Personalisation</h3>

<p>Today, a customer logged into Google can get a personalised search start page. Their personalised homepage offers modules of content from across the Google network, and from across the world wide web. Instead of Google search pushing people out of Google to other people's sites, Google's personalised homepage brings regular personalised content to the user.</p>

<p>Gmail benefits even more with customer accounts - realtime collaboration. The innovation of being able to communicate directly with your email contacts over IM is indeed a game changer. It's perhaps the most widely recognised use of the open-standards Jabber instant messaging platform. And even that innovation opens up avenues for further innovation - as a client for Twitter. Gmail is the personal nerve center.</p>

<h3>Collaboration</h3>

<p>Gmail has gone from an email client to a must-have collaboration tool. And yet, at any time, you can download all your email from Google and put it into your desktop email client and stop using GMail altogether. But then you lose out on the benefits of a seamless integration between email, instant messaging,  and personal information management.</p>

<p>The real innovation of Gmail is giving Google an excuse to have a customer identity service - before Gmail they didn't need this. With a centralised user identity service adding new customer-oriented services is streamlined. So there was no surprise that Google Docs integrated so well - and now that is a serious competitor to Microsoft Office and Open Office in the lower end of the market.</p>

<h3>Knowledge gathering</h3>
<p>It's the ability to personalise content where the real innovation is happening. Google's personalised homepages needed to solve the problem of how to integrate content from anywhere onto one page without one content block affecting another.</p>

<p>Google engineered a solution for bringing together content across the web into one single page, and that solution, admittedly crude, became the backbone for Open Social. Open Social is an abstraction of Google's personalised homepage solution, it empowers any site to display content from many other websites.</p>

<h3>Social engineering</h3>
<p>Social networking websites tagged along with Google's initiative, providing a compelling demonstration of interoperability through Google's inaugural Campfire evenings. Every major social networking site was represented, except Facebook.</p>

<p>Social networks benefit from Google's opening of its own personalised homepage services. The current path of innovation doesn't stop there.</p>

<h3>Every site is a social network</h3>
<p>A few weeks ago, Google announced Friend Connect; a practical solution for adding social networking features to any website. Every website can have its own social network, a community of visitors that are brought together by a common interest or goal. As a strategic counter to Facebook, it's a masterpiece.</p>

<h3>Social network leader</h3>
<p>Google are the de facto leader in open-standards social networks. But their core product is a search engine. It's a paradoxical situation, and probably not what Google anticipated from its original roots of keyword search. (And there's still no such thing as the Google Social Network!)</p>

<p>Google have made it possible for millions of social networks to flourish, using their code, their architecture, their identity system. Google manages the content generated by these social networks. They manage the identity of the website owner (but not the identities of the visitors). They manage the content created through that social network, as well as the attention data.</p>

<h3>From Gmail to social network leadership</h3>
<p>Google's 20% time has opened the doors to innovation from their employees. Google did themselves a favour by taking employees' ideas seriously. It would have been so easy to look at Gmail, point out that it has nothing to do with Google's key products, and nix the idea.</p>

<p>Google did something different. They took a risk opening Gmail to the public. They created a new offering unlike any other offering they had, and they were essentially forced to move away from generic search into customer specific and personalised content.</p>

<p>With personalised content came the requirement of dealing with visitor identity. And identities open up many avenues of value and further innovation because they allow sites to talk directly to a visitor in a personable manner.</p>

<p>Google are taking advantage of identity to provide a personalised experience to visitors. Gmail is but one of many destinations, but the real value is in the user profile because it enables other sources of value.</p>

<p>Starting with a web-based email client, Google have travelled a road that's led them into being the de facto leader in open-standards social networks.</p>

<p>The value in innovation isn't in the innovation itself, it's in the value of the further opportunities it opens up.</p>

      
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	<entry>
		<title>Make or break with Ubuntu</title>
		<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/stuff/MakeOrBreakWithUbuntu" />
		<id>http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog.stuff.MakeOrBreakWithUbuntu</id>
		<issued>2008-04-27T09:33-05:00</issued>
		<modified>2008-04-27T09:33-05:00</modified>
		
		<content type="text/html" mode="escaped">
			<![CDATA[
<p>I've reformatted my main home laptop (Thinkpad R31) from Windows XP to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). The XP install is borked to the point I can no longer use it. I thought I'd try out a recent version of Ubuntu and see if I can make the transition, and if that proves too much, I can always reformat the laptop with a brand new installation of Windows XP.</p>

<p>Why Ubuntu? The main reason is that Sam Ruby is using it on his company Thinkpad, and still keeps getting great stuff done. The fact that its funded by South African billionaire and all-round good-guy, Mark Shuttleworth is notable, but it's the general usability and what seems like brilliant community support from <a href="http://ubuntuforums.com/">Ubuntu forums</a> that are far better reasons.</p>


<h3>Dieing breath of XP</h3>

<p>My main home laptop running XP became too much of a hassle to use any more. Weekly reboots became daily reboots became thrice daily reboots. Then Firefox stopped loading and URLs with query strings. Quickly opening Internet Explorer, noticing how infested that browser was, and noticing it too couldn't load and URLs with query strings, I realised the XP install was too sick to continue.</p>

<p>Copied all my data off the laptop onto a USB enclosure took hours, so that ran overnight.</p>


<h3>Trying out Ubuntu Live</h3>

<p>On Monday, I took a look at the cover DVD from the latest issue of Linux Format (May 2008). I noticed one of the distributions was Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, so I burnt that to a CD, and started up the laptop with the live disk.</p>

<p>It's one of the really clever things about Ubuntu, the install disk is actually a live distribution, so you can try it out, see if the Gnome Desktop, networking and USB works okay before committing to an install.</p>

<p>Playing around Tuesday evening, the basics seemed to be working. The sites that I permanently have open in tabs worked. The web interface to Twitter worked, but the text-field and character counter were quite unresponsive. I was a little surprised that Ubuntu came bundled with Firefox 3 beta 5 as the default browser, instead of the production stable Firefox 2.</p>


<h3>Installing Ubuntu and applications</h3>

<p>With nothing really to lose I went ahead and installed Ubuntu, which took no time at all. Its ironic that installing Ubuntu today felt as smooth as installing Windows 98 back in the last century, and installing Windows 2000 afresh a few weeks ago felt like installing a 0.5 version of Slackware back from 1995. How times have changed. Well less than an hour later I was logged into Ubuntu running natively on my laptop.</p>

<p>Since the base system installed so quickly, that left most of Wednesday evening going through all of the additional packages picking out bits of software I wanted. This is the biggest collection of software I have ever seen - so it took a few hours. Unlike my previous non-serious installs of Linux installations, I thought I would just get the software items that I felt I genuinely needed right now, (except for a few urges, like Battle for Wesnoth, a turn-based wargame that I remember <a href="http://kid666.com/blog/2007/04/04/addictive-horribly-addictive-battle-for-wesnoth/">Tom blogging about a while back</a>, and LinCity).</p>

<p>The main reason I've felt locked into Windows was Chessbase and its engines. I normally run Shredder 7 on this particular laptop, using it to work through and summarise SuperGM chess tournaments on my blog <a href="http://www.chessvault.com/">Chess Vault</a>. This might be the main sticking point if I couldn't find a decent replacement on Ubuntu. I'd prefer not to have a third laptop just for that.</p>

<p>I let the application and package install run overnight. When I woke up the next morning the install popped up a dialog box for dokuwiki, asking for the URL path I wanted it running on. I accepted the default, but the installer seemed to just hang a few minutes later. After waiting about ten minutes for a sign of further progress I <kbd>Alt-Ctrl-Backspac</kbd>ed out, and rebooted the laptop. (Turns out the dokuwiki installer was just <a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dokuwiki/+bug/216980">expecting me to press <kbd>Enter</kbd> a few times</a>.)</p>

<p>Everything seemed to start okay. I reopened the package manager which immediately spotted that the last install run had failed and it provided me with a terminal command to attempt to repair this. I opened the terminal window, and <samp>sudo</samp>'ed the command, only to find that sudo was broken. (Which seemed odd, since the GUI version accepted my password when I opened the package manager). A Google search revealed that <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-613521.html">sudo was indeed broken</a> on the default install, and it had to do with the network settings, which didn't contain a mapping of my laptop hostname to 127.0.0.1. That took a few goes fixing through the Networking Dialogue, which is not very intuitive when adding/changing host lookups. But I eventually got the configuration added (I couldn't do it on the command line because it needed sudo).</p>

<p>With sudo fixed, running the repair command ran through cleanly, and I had Ubuntu running with Apache, web development tools, subversion, LinCity, Oolite, plus XBoard and Crafty (for chess), and the Pidgin IM client which had no problems connecting using my Yahoo IM profile.</p>

<h3>Tweaking the install</h3>

<p>I spent the next couple of days using Ubuntu like that, just getting used to its look and feel (including the 'fade-out' of various applications that were slow in responding). Just building confidence and trust with the system.</p>

<p>Saturday I tried out XBoard, and that responded fine. I decided to install scid - an open source chess database, and that again, just worked, even Crafty was configured by default as one of the analysis engines. That allowed me to finish off a chess blog post I was halfway through writing before XP failed on me.</p>

<p>Sunday I was quickly frustrated by Twitter's web client's sluggish response. So I dived into the package manager and found Twitux, which looked like a decent Twitter client, and came with the option of running from the system toolbar. Also installed a simple Bittorrent client - one which does just one torrent at a time. That takes me a step backward from the comfort of the official BitTorrent client which can handle multiple torrents. I just need to dig out the official client from the package manager.</p>

<p>The main customisation of the desktop is to switch off the animation, which felt sluggish, and not necessary for me. And adding a third workspace to the workspace switcher. That gives me one workspace for Firefox and general surfing, one workspace for Scid, and one workspace with Bluefish. Bluefish is for writing my blogposts, and I'm thinking I'm comfortable enough to start using for my main web development tool. It feels like an adequate replacement of Textpad.</p>

<h3>What I'm liking</h3>

<p>I've plugged in two random USB Flash drives, as well as my USB hard drive enclosure, and they just seamlessly worked. Grabbed an mp3 and double clicked it, Totem realised it didn't have the necessary codecs to play so it fired up a search in package manager to find the Gstreamer codecs which installed quickly and the mp3 just worked.</p>

<p>Scid, and the Crafty analysis worked by default. Bluefish just worked. Pidgin Instant Messaging client just worked. Twitux just worked.</p>

<p>And I'm liking the Workspace switcher. That helps me multitask so much better. The CPU is churning away analysing a position, and I'm doing something else in the meantime, knowing the results are just a workspace away. My external LCD monitor feels a little redundant right now, its been off for several days now.</p>

<h3>What I didn't like</h3>

<p>The <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615">del.icio.us toolbar</a> doesn't offer the option to install because Firefox 3 beta is too new. I guess I need to wait until Yahoo! update it. I suppose I can live with the <a href="http://del.icio.us/help/buttons">del.icio.us bookmarklets</a> for a while.</p>

<p>Sudo being broken by default (because of a hosts setting on networking), that was a little irritating. The fix took a while to apply because the networking dialogue wasn't intuitive. I was adding the host entry, saving, closing and reopening, and the entry was gone. The solution was to edit an existing entry with the 127.0.0.1 address, then save, and then disable and re-enable networking.</p>

<p>In Firefox I normally right-click on links and open them in a new tab. In Firefox 3 on Ubuntu, sometimes the context menu appears, but sometimes the "Save bookmark" dialogue, or Firebug opens, or Evolution (the email client) opens instead of the context menu. I haven't tracked down why this happens, my current gut feeling (untested) is that links without attached JavaScript events are okay, but those with attached events pull up Firebug. Maybe I should look into downgrading to Firefox 2 instead.</p>

<p>My online banking system doesn't support Firefox 3, or anything outside of a PC or Mac (according to their website). But that's because I have a crap bank than issues with Ubuntu or Firefox.</p>


<h3>Conclusion</h3>

<p>After a few very minor hiccups, Ubuntu is starting to grow on me. I haven't got dual monitors running yet - that's something I thought I would need to do at first, but I'm starting to feel fairly comfortable with the convenience of the workspace switcher. At the moment, Scid is chugging away analysing a position from Kramnik's game against Gelfand from Corus Wijk aan Zee earlier this year. I'm just blogging away with Bluefish, sometimes forgetting that the chess engine is still chugging away.</p>

<p>At the moment, it's satisfactory. Scid isn't completely up to the levels of Chessbase, I certainly haven't set it up properly yet. My next step is to get a stronger analysis engine, so to figure out how to get Fruit working with it (Fruit, a very strong chess engine, is yet another package that's already in the massive list of Ubuntu software list). Time will tell whether Ubuntu offers enough chessic software for me to forget about needing Shredder 7 installed. There's always the potential option of <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=31659">Chessbase and Wine</a>.</p>

<p>Just after I'd installed the base system, the very next day Canonical announced that the 8.04 version - Hardy Heron, was now release-ready, and that it is the version that benefits from Long Term Support - guaranteed support for 3 years. Looks like I timed the leap to Ubuntu very well!</p>
      
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	<entry>
		<title>The accessibility of the date-time pattern in Microformats</title>
		<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/access/AccessibilityOfDateTimeMicroformat" />
		<id>http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog.access.AccessibilityOfDateTimeMicroformat</id>
		<issued>2008-04-26T03:27-05:00</issued>
		<modified>2008-04-26T03:27-05:00</modified>
		
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<p>Jeremy Keith erupted into a hissy fit during the panel session of AbilityNet's <a href="http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/accessibility2/">Accessibility 2.0</a> conference yesterday. His venting revolved around earlier accessibility criticism of the microformat's adoption of the <code>abbr</code> element as a way of attaching machine-readable dates to written dates, for example in the <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar">calendar microformat</a>.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, Jeremy dodged the real accessibility issues of the date-time microformat pattern, instead preferring to create a strawman, and boisterously batter it to smithereens with his wooden sword. That is his choice, but it doesn't help to alleviate the accessibility issues of the date-time microformat pattern.</p>


<h3>Twitter and <abbr title="International Standards Organisation">ISO</abbr>-8601 date-times</h3>

<p>In a brilliantly informative talk about Twitter and <abbr title="Accessible Rich Internet Applications">ARIA</abbr>, <a href="http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/">Steve Faulkner</a> of <a href="http://www.paciellogroup.com/">The Paciello Group</a>, took the audience through the various features of Twitter that posed accessibility issues in screen readers. Each barrier was explained in detail, solutions using current technology discussed and implemented, and suprisingly, demonstrating practical solutions using ARIA.</p>

<p>One accessibility barrier Steve covered was Twitter's use of the <code>abbr</code> to add machine-readable ISO-8601 timestamps, which is decently summarised in W3C's <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime">Date and Time Note</a>. Marking up the publish times of twitter messages as an abbreviation meant that screenreader users with configurations set to expand abbreviations instead of getting a human friendly date, they received something that wasn't human friendly. This is what was in the markup:</p>

<pre title="HTML of Twitter's date-time pattern">
<code>
	&lt;abbr class="published" 
		title="2008-04-26T06:52:20+01:00"&gt;
		half a minute&lt;/abbr&gt;
</code>
</pre>

<p>Instead of getting the human friendly message of <q>half a minute</q>, a screen reader user with expanded abbreviations configured would get something like <q>two thousand and eight dash zero four dash twenty six tee six colon fifty two colon twenty plus one o'clock</q>. Not a particularly friendly or intuitive expansion. In fact, it is materially incorrect. The time stated is 06:52, not one o'clock.</p>

<p>Jeremy <a href="http://adactio.com/journal/1451/" rel="nofollow">took issue with Steve's criticisms</a> in his blog, accusing Steve, amongst other things, of <abbr title="Fear uncertainty doubt">FUD</abbr>. What Jeremy fails to realise is that Steve Faulkner has a long track-record of basing his findings on thorough screen reader testing. And Steve knows screen readers. Much of what we know about making Ajax accessible to screen-reader users comes from the work of Steve Faulkner and Gez Lemon, in their trademark style of collaborative deep thinking, designing and implementing their ideas, and rigorously testing their ideas, and documenting their findings, and publishing them openly for peer-review. Hardly the foundation of fear, uncertainty and doubt.</p>


<h3>Testing with screen reader users</h3>

<p>The litmus test of accessibility is usability testing with people with disabilities. As it happens, some usability testing was done on the date-time pattern, as Jeremy Keith notes:</p>

<blockquote cite="http://adactio.com/journal/1451/">
	<p>By the way, Robin [Christopherson] - who is sitting two seats away from me - was recently brought in to test BBC listings which had been marked up with hCalendar. He described the feared accessibility problems as unfounded. Most screen reader users do not change their default settings for abbreviations and by default, abbreviations are not expanded.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>It is encouraging that accessibility testing was done, kudos to the BBC. However the conclusion drawn is flawed. I'm very surprised the Microformats community accepted the justification as Jeremy describes it:</p>

<blockquote cite="http://adactio.com/journal/1451/">
	<p>Most screen reader users do not change their default settings for abbreviations and by default, abbreviations are not expanded.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>There are two issues with this justification:</p>

<p>First, to my knowledge, there are no published studies or investigations available that document how most screen reader users have their screen readers configured. That's something we in the accessibility circles wish we had access to, but not have the resources to fund such a study. If the Microformats community have this information, I urge them to share it publicly.</p>

<p>What strikes me as very odd is that three screen reader users I have worked with over the last few years have all got abbreviations configured to be expanded. Do we just ignore that as a statistical anomaly or insignificant?</p>

<p>Second, there's no indication from Jeremy's comments that the microformats community asked the pertinent question, <q>Why don't most users have their screen readers configured to expand abbreviations?</q> (Surely the semantics of a properly marked up abbreviation offer value to a visitor?)</p>

<p>One major part of the reason is the lack of properly structured markup out on the real web. Screen reader users find very little benefit to having the configuration switched on because the reading of most pages is no noticeable improvement because there's hardly any abbreviations on the pages to actually expand. Why have a configuration turned on that adds practically no value?</p>

<p>Marking up abbreviations is part and parcel of building semantically structured documents. It is something espoused by microformats, especially Jeremy Keith, who takes special delight in semantic structure. It's ironic, then, that the justification for the date-time pattern as not being a barrier to screen reader users largely depends on screen reader users retaining the belief that there is no value in semantic markup, and thus it's not worthwhile for them to set their screen readers to expand abbreviations.</p>

<p>In short, the microformats community is doing itself, as well as screen reader users, a disservice by validating the predominant view that semantic structure has no value. If structured and semantic markup has no value, neither does microformats.</p>


<h3>Readability of ISO-8601 timestamps</h3>

<p>Jeremy goes on to claim that ISO-8601 timestamps are readable:</p>

<blockquote cite="http://adactio.com/journal/1451/">	
	<p>Besides, an internationalised way of writing a date is not just machine-readable data (I'm a human and I can read 2008-04-25 just fine). I'm not saying that the abbr pattern doesn't have problems (it does but they are semantic in nature) but Steve is mischaracterising the current situation.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Jeremy ignores Steve's actual example, and is actually being deceitful. He finds <q>2008-04-25</q> readable, but says nothing about the readability of <q>2008-04-25T17:33:52+01:00</q>. It is true that both sequences are valid ISO-8601 date-times. But it was the second, longer form of the date-time that Steve Faulkner raised as an issue - one that Jeremy quietly ignores (maybe hoping it will go away?). Jeremy plays the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man">strawman argument</a>, arguing that a shortened date format is readable, but ignoring Steve's actual example which is being used on Twitter.</p>

<p>The first form, that Jeremy prefers is only of use for all-day or multi-day events, not the events predominant of calendars (hour-long meetings), or publish times on Twitter. Its the second, longer, form that's going to be more common, and this is no "semantic in nature" problem, it is a barrier for screen reader users who have expanded abbreviations configured.</p>

<p>This is a poor show from Jeremy Keith. I hope its not reflective of the rest of the Microformats community.</p>


<h3>Panel criticisms</h3>

<p>Furthermore, <a href="http://adactio.com/journal/1457/" rel="nofollow">Jeremy criticises me</a> for not being specific about which microformats, and claims the issue I have is with the date-time abbreviation pattern. This is incorrect and misleading. I directly pointed out the initial handling of the empty link include pattern as an example of where accessibility hadn't really been thought through.</p>

<p>Jeremy then chides that I should practice what I preach, which means he is unaware of the screen reader testing I did to test the <a href="http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/01/23/empty-links/">empty link include pattern</a>, which was fed back to the Microformats community. My work is referenced and acknowledged in the <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/include-pattern">include pattern microformat</a> wiki page. The testing involved two full-time screen reader users, a set of repeatable tests, and an internal peer review of my findings and conclusions. Also, none of the findings and conclusions have been effectively challenged or refuted. I stand by my work.</p>

<p>The third criticism, a re-iteration of the strawman argument that Jeremy finds <q>2008-04-25</q> readable, still doesn't mention whether the typical date-time format that is most likely to be used is readable. Screen reader testing and documentation by Steve Faulkner (in his presentation) and <a href="http://lab.dotjay.co.uk/tests/screen-readers/microformats/datetime-design-pattern/">Jon Gibbins</a> has demonstrated there is an issue when screen readers have expand abbreviations configured. Both quote test examples involving the most typical date-time format.</p>

<p>The argument that most screenreaders don't have abbreviations set to expanded, and thus a human-unfriendly <code>title</code> attribute on an <code>abbr</code> is acceptable betrays microformats' commitment to semantic and structured data. What possible value is there to promoting semantic markup if the net result is that the perceivability and usability of a semantic feature (the expansion of abbreviations) is seriously degraded because of the presence of human unfriendly blob of data? The date-time pattern is, in its current state, a barrier to screen reader users taking advantage of the abbreviation expansion features of their software.</p>


<p>Essentially, Jeremy Keith's credibility in accessibility has taken a serious knock. The outburst in the panel discussion did not help alleviate the documented problems about the date-time abbreviation format, or show a willingness to tackle the issues raised. And this is a concern.</p>


<p><strong>Update 15:19</strong> Jeremy Keith says that he got upset he was hearing "Microformats are inaccessible". I didn't say that on the panel, and I don't recall Steve Faulkner saying that in his presentation.</p>      
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