There's recently been a round of debate about whether the alt attribute for media (eg, <img alt="Foo">) should remain required or could become optional.
As I understand it, some web page creators say "some of our images don't have good logical, human-readable alt text, so why make us put in alt attributes with crappy made-up values", and other people argue that it is worth the extra effort to improve accessibility. (No doubt I've butchered both sides of the argument, but that's what I was able to take away from it.)
The two standards groups hosting the draft HTML specs appear to have different centers of gravity with regard to this issue, and to be making increasingly snippy comments back and forth about the other's handling of the dispute.
Oh my god -- a class of fifth graders in 2009 wasn't aware of two relevant scientific papers published in 2008?
The only way to explain these pre-teen children's ignorance of this knowledge is that there's a conspiracy dedicated to hiding the facts from them!
No, in practice eleven-year-old kids usually aren't reading the current scientific literature -- they're learning from their teachers and reading texts that have been written for students, and it's not surprising that it takes a few years for new information to permeate the educational system.
I understand the concern the piece is raising, but surely there are better examples than that, right?
I thought the article was quite clear on this. The more important point is: _Probable causes? In fact, there's no scientific evidence that cellphones, pesticides, global warming or the alleged insufficiency of wildflowers are linked in any way to CCD._
Not knowing recent research on it might be fine. Maybe the articles were in Spanish and hard to find or something. But if the lesson ended up with kids getting concerned and writing letters, and they say "yea we're not sure, it could be some stuff that's unrelated", that sounds like a missed learning opportunity, maybe.
I don't think the kids are doing too badly on that one, though, because you'd get results not entirely dissimilar if you polled working biologists. CCD is a particularly tricky example because everyone agrees that something is happening, but no causes have proven links. Yet there presumably is some cause or set of causes, so scientists differ in their hypotheses as to what those causes might be. I suspect if you were to poll, you'd find that very few think a link to cell-phone towers is probable, but quite a few think a link to pesticides is probable.
I find it a bit frustrating (missing features; Unix compatibility issues), but the user interface was easier for our non-technical staff to learn than was the interface for RT, which was our initial choice.
You're definitely not too old -- I'm 36, and my co-founder is in his forties.
Possible drawbacks to older founders include:
- may not be able to work for free (or nearly so) for as long a time, because they have families to support (or have simply grown accustomed to a higher standard of living than ramen and crashing on someone's couch).
- may not be able to work for as many hours per week, again because of families, accustomed comfort, etc.
On the positive side, older founders are:
- more likely to have the business and professional relationships that will facilitate customer sales and/or investor deals.
- may be able to work more efficiently and effectively, because of the things they have learned (technology, management, specific domains, business, etc).
There might be some business plans that can best be executed by college-age folks, but there are others that are best executed by someone older -- figure out how to make your idea work for you, and go for it!
It's not as "hip" as Python or Ruby, but I remain a big fan of Perl for server-side self-hosted web/database applications -- depending on what you're building, you can often find pre-existing modules on CPAN that provide a lot of the plumbing you'll need.
And of course, Perl's syntax is very similar to PHP, so the transition might be a bit easier than to a Python, although your milage will vary.
Lastly, it's worth noting that the choice of server-side and client-side technologies are mostly independent... You can use either HTML/JS or Flash as the client interface to talk to server-side logic written in any of the PHP/Perl/Python/etc. languages discussed above.
RT is very full-featured and customizable, although it has a few rough edges and can take some time to learn. It's open source and is also available in as a hosted service. http://bestpractical.com/services/hosting.html
FogBugz is decent -- not as flexible as RT, but may be a bit easier for non-techies to get started with. It's also available in both hosted and installable versions. http://fogcreek.com/fogbugz/
RT and FogBugz both suck. You have to click 3-5 times to get a request filed. That gets annoying real fast. Check out my comment below about Helpspot (and no I don't work for them either :)
I've been using RT for a while now. If you have to click that much it's because of the way you've set things up. You can even do most all the single-ticket operations (opening, updating, resolving) through email. I know a few admins that regularly manage dozens of tickets at a time without ever using the web interface.
I've no experience with RT, but a quick look seems to indicate it's more ticket-based, whereas FogBugz covers more areas (wiki, integration with version control s/w, etc.).
As I understand it, some web page creators say "some of our images don't have good logical, human-readable alt text, so why make us put in alt attributes with crappy made-up values", and other people argue that it is worth the extra effort to improve accessibility. (No doubt I've butchered both sides of the argument, but that's what I was able to take away from it.)
See http://blog.whatwg.org/omit-alt for an argument in favor of making it optional, and http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/articles/altinhtml5.h... for it being required, or http://juicystudio.com/article/requiring-alt-attribute-html5... for a list of pros and cons.
The two standards groups hosting the draft HTML specs appear to have different centers of gravity with regard to this issue, and to be making increasingly snippy comments back and forth about the other's handling of the dispute.