Joe Clark

Joe Clark is a respected accessibility expert that has also written several books.

I have a lot of respect for Joe and the work he has done to further general knowledge and awareness of Web Accessibility.

Unfortunately Joe is also an ad hominem troll towards me and others. Such behavior is not only unacceptable but unbecoming of someone as knowledgable as Joe and thus I am documenting it until such time as he chooses to stop, retract his ad hominem attacks, and apologize to those he has attacked.

Most recent first:

• 2007-11-28 Google can't code (as twittered)
  • general ad hominem attack on Google engineers. Asserting they "grew up with between D&D sessions in suburban basements" is a typical negative labeling of someone as being nerdy/unsociable (no offense to those who play D&D, but the tone usually taken with such statements clearly implies it as an insult, nevermind that there's nothing wrong with playing D&D). Additionally characterizing them as "barely-socialized guys, with short tempers, poor social skills" which is obviously insulting, and labeling them as "borderline Aspergerian, hence borderline disabled" thus insulting their mental capabilities by implying a mental handicap for which no clinical evidence is provided.
  • personal attacks on Ian Hickson (aka "Hixie"). Characterizing him as "preoccupied rewriting the infrastructure of the Web". "preoccupied" is asserting Hixie is focusing on something at the expense of other more important things (without actually naming what those are, though one might infer from Joe's post that he thinks Hixie should be focusing on fixing Google's code). "rewriting" something, especially something so successful as the Web has a strong negative implication, especially among engineers. Referring to Hixie's work as "rewriting" is inaccurate or at best a gross exaggeration. Hixie is doing no such thing. The current focus of his work is the HTML5 effort, which is an incremental iteration upon HTML4, not a rewrite. A rewrite of the the infrastructure of the Web (at the content level, the same level as the implicated HTML5) would be attempting to get everyone to publish text content on the web in a different language instead of HTML, such as perhaps: SVG, RDF, or worse, the (at least somewhat) proprietary PDF, SWF, XAML etc.
  • personal attacks on me. Characterizing my style of speech as "rushed and pressurized" and labeling such a style with my name. This characterization and asserting it is a "Tantek-style", is both insulting/defamatory and inaccurate. E.g the most recent counter example to Joe's assertion, my talk on Social Network Portability at the Fundmentos Web conference this past October in Spain, which was both slow and clear enough to be successfully simultaneously translated into thorough Spanish according to numerous reports by Spanish attendees, but was also composed of calm complete sentences according to personal feedback from Jeremy Keith (who was also at the conference).

• 2007-08-12 comment on Molly's post Dear W3C, Dear WaSP
  • personal attacks on me.

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