The future of U&A D&A

[absalom]

[Mod note:  This thread was spit off from this topic. - http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,41596.0.html]



They're not integrating it.. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I was once part of the Usability and Accessibility / Design and Accessibility team, and they kicked me out when I was trying to bring the grandfathered release of .12 into some semblance of semantic structure.

At best, you can have a stable fork of .12 to deliver semantics (under the proviso that there are no more releases for the 1.0.x line), and the absolute joy of template overrides in 1.5 (which were in Mambo, xMambo, and J! 1.0.x, but this time, they're using them in an "official" capacity instead of marketing them as a feature). So still no real solution.

I've been working on these forks prior to what happened with U&A/D&A.

[Jinx]

For the record, Absalom was not removed from the D&A working group for the reason he names. It has always been part of our release and versioning strategy not to make any changes in a stability release that could compromise backwards compatibilty. Hence also why we cannot change the core markup for the 1.0 series as it would break all existing templates available today.

On a sidenote, We are still (more then a year now) eagerly awaiting the results of Absalom his work...

[daestrom]

Thanks for the replys.  I do remember Absalom was in the U&A team and wondered what happened.  Anyway, I don't want to start an argument or stir up some sort of flame war.

not to make any changes in a stability release that could compromise backwards compatibilty. Hence also why we cannot change the core markup for the 1.0 series as it would break all existing templates available today.

I'm sure there are changes that can be made that wouldn't compromise any backwards compatibility and wouldn't break templates.  For example com_login:

get( 'pageclass_sfx' ); ?>">
get( 'header_login' ); ?>


This has no semantic meaning and should be a heading, it also won't be found easily by screen readers and even search engines. This also doesn't need a class as all h2s for example would be the same.  So I have to change this every time there is an upgrade to:


get( 'header_login' ); ?>



Another example is the lines below.  This is output without being wrapped in a paragraph tags.

get( 'description_login_text' ); ?>


This should be:


get( 'description_login_text' ); ?>


These are just a few examples of code that could be changed without compromising backwards compatibility.

[absalom]

For the record, Absalom was not removed from the D&A working group for the reason he names. It has always been part of our release and versioning strategy not to make any changes in a stability release that could compromise backwards compatibilty. Hence also why we cannot change the core markup for the 1.0 series as it would break all existing templates available today.

It won't break all existing templates. At the end of the day, all com_template does is wrap whatever is the output of the CMS is (core + editor) and spit it out.

Products grow and develop over time, and it is no great loss to educate the developer to follow a new coding standard / coding design.  Since most of it's CSS-based anyway, you are looking at a reduced CSS feature set, not the archiac current one with "moduletable", "contentheading", etc.. as semantics does manage the entire output (core + editor) much better.

Surely having a smaller CSS feature set, especially when that feature set is more semantic, is a bonus.

Why maintain dependence for archiac systems ? That's what hasn't been answered in the 1.5 Beta. You still have the same archiac structures semantically, and even with the override systems - they only target name.php and name.html.php in 1.0.x and probably similar in 1.5 (confirmed: getTemplate() only looks at existing codebase to figure out if it needs to override).. which means true extensibility / device ubitiqiousness / doing mashups on the level of API's is out the window.

As for the record:

I pitched that 1.0.12 should have been a better release than it was, including detailing at length the direction of a semantic .12 release, as part of D&A before you censored, kicked and removed all evidence that I had ever come up with such a project direction.

Rob, Nic and others all managed to get their voice heard, and here we are, post .12, with less work in any stage of completion than what was scoped for any development build of J! from any official member. At least I've kept to my word and kept the .12 semantic project on track. This is why I'm looking at a mid Jan go-live for semantic microformatted .12 (which is actually a superset of what I was pitching inside D&A).

See, I've already published the evidence of what was discussed on .12:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/absalomedia/337228586/

It covers the page title / SEF issues requested by Joe/Eyezberg, the GZIP fixes (which do actually increase speed in all tests I've run locally and live), global correct date formatting (fixed thanks to my work with Wordpress) permalinking (again, Wordpress, tested and submitted as J! artifact), and removes the dependencies of the validator code from a8e.

I noted over 30 posts culled and censored in my leave of absense, and those posts were in relation to 1.0.x and 1.5 direction inside D&A.

On a sidenote, We are still (more then a year now) eagerly awaiting the results of Absalom his work...

More than a year ? You're a little too loose with your lips, Johan. The concept has been around for a year (which is what I've said elsewhere, before you culled and censored it). The code hasn't.

edit: spelling, grammar, formatting

[Jinx]

Thanks for the replys.  I do remember Absalom was in the U&A team and wondered what happened.  Anyway, I don't want to start an argument or stir up some sort of flame war.

Thanks, it's appreciated. What has happened in private stays in private. I agree with the changes you propose but as I explained already doing them in a maintance release would break existing sites.

I only want to add to this that the focus of the D&A working group is and has always been design and accessibility (508 and WCAG 2.0) hence it's name. (More info can be found here : http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/19/53/). Microformats, SEO, SEF, permalinks ... are more part of the responsability of the development working group. If you want to discuss those I would like to refer you to the development forums

I pitched that 1.0.12 should have been a better release than it was, including detailing at length the direction of a semantic .12 release, as part of D&A before you censored, kicked and removed all evidence that I had ever come up with such a project direction.

Lawrence, you know very well that that isn't true. We never censor or remove information on our forums unless it is in violation with our forum rules and code of conduct.

I do appreciate the work you are doing Lawrence and I'm looking forward to a first result. I have said this many times before. No need to start yet another flame war about that. Just scratch your itch, share and if enough people like what you have done it well more then likely end up in the core in a future release. 

[absalom]

I only want to add to this that the focus of the D&A working group is and has always been design and accessibility (508 and WCAG 2.0) hence it's name. (More info can be found here : http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/19/53/). Microformats, SEO, SEF, permalinks ... are more part of the responsability of the development working group. If you want to discuss those I would like to refer you to the development forums

ROTFLMAO. Microformats are semantics.. which are about usability and good design.

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards..

Microformats are:
# a way of thinking about data
# design principles for formats
# adapted to current behaviors and usage patterns (“Pave the cow paths.”)
# highly correlated with semantic XHTML, AKA the real world semantics, AKA lowercase semantic web, AKA lossless XHTML
# a set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general.

Good design is good engineering. I've seen a lot of things in my time developing for the web, but when there is a clear differentiation between design and semantics in terms of how a project delivers itself, obviously something needs to be rethought.  You are not coding for coding's sake, nor for your name to be spread across the world, Johan. You are coding to make a good product.

Design is about engineering something that works in such a way that it makes the best use of engineering, structure, language and whatever else is needed or available at the time.

Lawrence, you know very well that that isn't true. We never censor or remove information on our forums unless it is in violation with our forum rules and code of conduct.

I know which posts were culled in my absence. Some of them were directly related to the direction of 1.0.x.

I do appreciate the work you are doing Lawrence and I'm looking forward to a first result. I have said this many times before. No need to start yet another flame war about that. Just scratch your itch, share and if enough people like what you have done it well more then likely end up in the core in a future release. 

Generation 1 was already out the door mid December, which is why you have the screenshot on Flickr. I'll be releasing bits and pieces of the associated functionality on the Forge (e.g. Dublin Core, trackbacking, permalinking) so other people can benefit.

Generation 2 is actually my site go-live.

[Jenny]

Any further flaming, uncivil remarks or off topic posts will be removed immediately, and this thread will be closed.

Please read our forum rules located here: http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,65.0.html  If you feel you cannot abide by the rules of the forum I sincerely suggest you don't post.

Thanks to everyone for their cooperation. 

[Jenny]

As it seems this thread cannot be kept on topic it will now be closed.  Off topic posts were removed.