Priorities and user agent support

The best that the W3C can do is to recommend that authors implement the
LANG attribute and the ABBR and ACRONYM elements, and that user agents
provide the necessary support. Apart from interim measures (the "Until
user agents" qualification) the priorities in the guidelines are, as
required by their respective definitions, chosen to reflect the impact of
a particular problem upon the accessibility of web content. Thus, if
certain markup or style language features are not implemented in the short
to medium term, then, when the requisite user agent features are
introduced, the access difficulties will not have been overcome. Likewise,
if these language features are not implemented by user agents but are
deployed in actual documents, their use will be ineffectual.

What is needed, therefore, is action on both the content and the user
agent sides; and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are intended to
address the former of these requirements.

Received on Tuesday, 27 April 1999 03:38:11 UTC