In keeping with the theme of Maritn’s use of language, I thought would survey his top ten most commonly used language constructions for conveying frustration:

1. “BAH!”
2. “I don’t like that plan.” or “That is not my plan.”
3. “What is going on with you guys?” (One of many phrases that Martin has heard from one of his parents and turned around to use against us.)
4. “I’m very very mad!”
5. “Go Away!” (Usually followed by, “I need my space.”)
6. “I wanted to be FIRST. Hmph!”
7. “But I can do it ALL. BY. MYSEEEELLFFF.”
8. Hitting the nearest person, animal or object.
9. “You did [X] and I do not like that because I do not like [X].”
10. (random sniffing and grunts to convey a mixture of anger & saddness)

Several of these are often used in combination and the order is somewhat random though “BAH!” tends to come first.

I’m not suggesting that any of these are unique to our child and in fact many of the key terms used, particularly “space” and “plan”, come from his preschool’s lexicon.

This one trip emphasized the need for light rail before we even made it to the ribbon cutting ceremony.

1. We walked over a bus top and arrived 10 minutes earlier to take the 6:26am south bound 358 bus. It never showed up. Instead we got on the 6:41am bus that, thankfully, did arrive on time.
2. Arriving at Union station at 7am (exactly when we SoundTransit asked us to be there), we rushed through to find the shuttle bus that would take us to the ribbon cutting ceremony at Mt. Baker station.
3. The shuttle bus got lost and nearly ended up stuck in a neighborhood with small streets when it tried to turn around.

Never-the-less we did make it in time to listen to some back-patting speeches and then board the first trains open to the public. We had an option of taking a north-bound (Downtown Seattle) or south-bound (Tukwila) train, and I had decided earlier in the week that I wanted to ride to the south terminus and then back to downtown. The entire trip was great: the stations, tracks, & trains appear to be well built.

One thing that dawned on my wife and I during the speeches was that our son would never know a Seattle without light rail. Additionally, as he reaches voting age a number of SoundTransit Link extensions to the existing system will be finished and Seattle will have to vote on when & where to continue this great project — so I hope today will instill a bit of excitement about mass transit for him. Hopefully when he mails in his future voting ballot, he’ll remember his cranky old father reminding him that “it wasn’t always this easy, you use to have to take 3 buses to get from there to here.”

A new favorite of ours is:

Pick me down

A variation of “pick me up” of course. Awesome.

Also interesting is his use of:

sit on my lap

What he really means is, “Let me sit on your lap”.

Sometimes it doesn’t work.

I want not go outside

moments later…

I not want go outside

Besides testing his world with language, Martin has many phrases (often used in a socially unacceptable ways) that tend to get a chuckle.

We’ll often be on a busy bus headed home from a long day when Martin will point at someone and say:

I want that guy get off bus.

He enjoys when people get off the bus because the door opens and the floor/ceiling lights come on. Still, these moments make you blush. Last week he at least asked someone to sit next to us.

Along the “that guy” lines, there are a number of inquisitive phrases he uses with either males or females. The pattern is usually: (WH-word) "that guy" (verb)?

What that guy do/doing?
Where that guy go/going?

Martin also has a pretty direct approach to asking for stuff:

Hey mommy/daddy read this!
Hey mommy/daddy eat this!
Hey mommy/daddy play trains in my room!

It is a fun time to be a parent.

In the photo left to right: Me, Arve Bersvendsen, Lachlan Hunt*, Ian Hickson*, Anne van Kesteren*, and Geoffrey Sneddon*. Photo taken by Kai Hendry.
* Evil Cabal Member

Too much of our work happens over the internet (IRC, email, blogs, wikis, etc), for obvious reasons, and meeting in-person at least once a year gives you a chance to attach something more tangible to the experience. We each have our own “quirks mode” that is difficult to understand in a medium like email unless you’ve caught of the mannerisms, facial expressions, vocalizations, etc before hand.

A good overview of the “demoable” bits of HTML 5 (it is hard or too boring to demo lots of the parsing, dom consistency, error handling changes).

(The video is password protected, same as all of our photos of Martin. Ping me if you don’t know the credentials.)

Sure, that’s an entry level ladder, but it was fun to watch him figure it all out in one shot.

His post gets to the heart of why I’ve disabled comments on my personal weblogs for the last couple year. When we started up this blog, I decided to enable comments because we do enjoy talking with family, friends, and strangers. Additionally we are going to go to great lengths to set the tone in the comments section per post… every post is different in nature and sometimes whacky & randomness rules the day… other times a little storytelling is required.

… Back to Matt’s post, there were a number of great replies (because of the subject matter and also people know that Matt won’t tolerate nonsense on his personal site), the one from David Wertheimer is interesting because it talks about Matt’s project Metafilter:

Your problem is basic scalability. It’s the same thing that happened on Metafilter: when it had 3,000 users, it was divine; at a runaway 30,000 users, it got a bit maniacal. Your pragmatic solution (five bucks! barrier to entry!) was both profitable and had the added impact of preserving community and signal:noise, as a quick look at the free Yahoo Answers will attest.

Indeed. If sites like Y! Answers charged a $5 “activation fee” for each user account they probably weed out a lot of the noise. That runs counter to yesterday’s post from 37signals’ that “activation fees are obscene” because in the Metafilter case the fee is reasonable and the end result (better signal) was highly desirable to that community.

If you were following but dropped out of the <img> & @alt discussion going on in HTML 5 for the last several months – Ian Hickson has a new summary of all the numerous proposals, research, problems, spec changes, etc. Somehow two people publicly responded to Ian’s email in 5 minutes or less… I guess I’m slow because it took me probably thirty minutes to read the email, go back and research the various previous and current drafts, review all the cited links, etc.

In terms of proposals, there’s really only two core solutions to providing accessible text for <img> resources:

1. @alt is always required full stop.
2. @alt is available to use but not required.

(It has been suggested several times on public-html, forums, and blogs that HTML 5 removed the possibility to provide @alt text – this never never happened. @alt was made optional in early editor’s drafts, but not removed. Now that we have that cleared up…)

Every other proposal is a variant of these two… that is provide guidance and conformance language that determines that type of text that must be present under certain conditions. Often those conditions can’t be checked by a machine. This is where the fun starts.

HTML 4 choose solution #1 and whether you consider that choice successful or not depends on what your desired end-game was:

• Wide spread tool support for entering alternative text? Mostly good. Even Microsoft Word lets you enter @alt content.
• Wide spread use of @alt by authors in which the alternative content adequately describes the referring image? Not so good. Quite poor really. @alt is often missing altogether, present but empty, or simply repeats the image’s file name. Lame.

I can sympathize with the folks who feel that requiring @alt led to better tool support. Software engineers like requirements documents, test cases, etc. If the spec says “required, full stop.” it is easy enough to satisfy that condition.

At the same time I’m more of a “make it possible to do things with technology and step back” guy… provide a method of storing the alternative text but actually requiring it seems bizarre since we don’t have the appropriate artificial intelligence technology to check whether the alternative text describes the image resource to the various audiences. One problem with @alt is that has to describe the image as the author “sees” it as well as how end-users, spiders, and 3rd party services would like to interpret it as well.

Besides the legacy problems of @alt, there are front-end interface problems… such as it is particularly cumbersome to provide @alt text for say 25 images you just uploaded from your Nokia smart-phone or even an Apple iPhone. I don’t envision a lot of consumers patiently navigating through that experience.

Finally, there is a disconnect between what must be done now and what will be necessary when HTML 5 is fully deployed in the wild… which, in theory, is roughly a decade from now. Mobile web browsing is going to be wildly popular in 10 years and it will expose the UI problems even more than they are now. A solution that seems acceptable and fair today will be different than one suitable for ten years from now.

There’s no magic bullet for alternative text on the web. The solution requires a mechanism for software or, ideally, a human to describe an image through text and there are really several of these in HTML 5:

• @alt

@alt alone is not sufficient for all use cases. Supplying one of more of the following might be a way forward:

• @role
• @title
• <legend>
• <figure>

This the approach the current draft has taken, as Ian wrote in his email:

Are there cases where the image is lacking good alt text that wouldn’t be covered by one of the following?:

• title=”" attribute on the <img> itself
• <legend> of the <figure> that contains the <img>
• heading of the section that contains the <img>

We could say that for these “key content without alt text” cases, we have the alt=”" attribute omitted, but there must be at least one of the above, and the first of the above that is present must include sufficient information to orient the user.

I like the new draft a lot better — not just because of this approach, but the overall language (thanks to much feedback from public-html) is much cleaner. I look forward to seeing how the latest language is refined over the next few months.

Q. How do you make Bellevue more walkable?

A. Bellevue was laid out as a suburban city and one of the legacies of that is these superblocks that are too long. We’re adding mid-block crossings … and updating and making (downtown) more visible and interesting with more artwork. I think it’s going to be very exciting to have a more walkable downtown. We’re also identifying more bike corridors, running both north to south and east to west.

Nice to see the mayor recognizes downtown Bellevue’s many problems. Walking and bking through downtown Bellevue and the surround area (8th, 10th, 12th ave) sucks.