Re: Required views

Hi Charles,

I very much agree with your rationale, but your Guideline 
doesn't work for me.

It seems as though there are two issues:

1) Separation of views. The author may want to author under
any of N views and the user may want to browse under any of M views.

2) The user interface of the authoring tool should obey the UA
Guidelines
 and allow the user (in this case, the author) to control styles.

If think 5.1 is meant to address point 1 specifically, as point 2
is covered (or should be covered) more generally elsewhere. Perhaps
we can strengthen the wording so that the Guideline reflects more
clearly your rationale.

 - Ian


Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> In the November 12 version guideline 5.1 requires optional views of the
> document. The Priority 1 techniques are to support an authoring/editing
> view and a browsing view which is equivalent to a print preview in a word
> processor.
> 
> I don't think this makes much sense - word processors produce a particular
> kind of output depending on the printing setup. HTML does not - it depends
> on the client User Agent, which is totally unpredictable (that's why we're
> doing this). So a preview function is going to reinforce an artificial
> view that the page 'IS' the way that it is rendered by MSIE, or Lynx, or
> whatever rendering engine is used for the preview mode. Providing multiple
> rendering agents, which is equivalent to testing a page in numerous user
> agents is not scaleable, and not really practical anyway.
> 
> Nonetheless many developers do make use of some rendering engine in an
> attempt to convince people that WYSIWYG editing of HTML is possible,
> because that is the idea many naive web authors have.
> 
> I therefore suggest that we replace the guideline with one something like
> the following:
> 
> Guideline: Where a rendering engine is used, ensure that it allows the
> user to customise presentation.
> 
> Rationale: Making web authors more aware of the fact that the presentation
> of Web material is finally under the control of the user will increase
> their ability to understand the many accessibility issues that arise from
> the mistaken view that 'the Internet is <some browser>' and give them a
> more realisitic understanding of the different ways their material may be
> presented.
> 
> Techniques: Use a rendering engine that provides the accessibility
> features required by the User Agent Guidelines[1] [Priority 2 - it is
> possible to produce an authoring tool which has no rendering engine and
> which is still accessible]
> 
> Charles McCathieNevile

-- 
Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org) 
Tel/Fax: (212) 684-1814 
http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs

Received on Tuesday, 8 December 1998 10:02:18 UTC