Web Standards, Accessibility & More » wave http://weboverhauls.com/dennislembree/blog Personal blog of Dennis E. Lembree, web site professional Sat, 11 Feb 2012 03:44:15 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Disappointed in Google WAVE http://weboverhauls.com/dennislembree/blog/2009/11/23/disappointed-in-google-wave/ http://weboverhauls.com/dennislembree/blog/2009/11/23/disappointed-in-google-wave/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:12:56 +0000 Dennis http://weboverhauls.com/dennislembree/blog/?p=811 Continue reading →]]> Google WAVE logo

Google WAVE logo

What can I say besides I’m just plain disappointed in Google WAVE. There was so much hype, so much excitement about it, and now it’s evaporated.

No HTML5

I understood that WAVE was to be done in HTML5, but it has a doc type of HTML 4.01. And actually, I found that it has a very serious case of “Divitis” (too many DIV tags). Can’t find any type of HTML5 tag at all, not even a section tag, header tag, nuthin’. Just a ton of DIVs and SPANs.

If you’re curious, here’s a look at the top of the source:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html><head><meta name="gwt:property" content="locale=en">

And the generated source:

<html><head><meta name="gwt:property" content="locale=en">

Not Accessible

Google WAVE is not web accessible. Period. Simplistically, this means that people with disabilities cannot use it, or it’s very difficult. For more on this, check out my Web Axe entry Podcast #75: Jeremy Keith Interview, Google Wave and Google Wave Preview Accessibility Review by WebAIM’s Jared Smith.

To further frustrate us web accessibility professionals, Google has stolen the name of WebAIM’s free tool WAVE (web accessibility evaluation tool).

No Usage

No one’s using Google WAVE. Most people I know now who want a WAVE invite (and that’s a lot of folks), has received one by now. And I haven’t seen much activity at all. As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen any new messages for a month now.

If you’re on WAVE, please send me a message; that may help me feel better! (smiley) My address is dlembree [AT] googlewave [DOT] NOSPAM com

Addendum

How ironic. I just noticed that I received some WAVE invites, so if you don’t have an account and still want one after reading this (smiley), please feel free to leave a comment.

I overheard something that made me think of this funny line:

Today’s Google WAVE invites are becoming yesterday’s AOL invite CD ROM disks.

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