Re: Required views

I quite agree. Do you have a proposed wording (or want to write one)?

Charles McCathieNevile

On Tue, 8 Dec 1998, Ian Jacobs wrote:

> 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 12:42:57 UTC