- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 11:50:51 -0400 (EDT)
- To: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
- cc: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Some additional thoughts:
There are several checkpoints that could be expressed collectively as mark up
semantics according the specification. For example, HTML provides markup for
various kind of semantic differences. Tables are one class of this (as well
as being one possible presentation of 2-dimensional data).
Chaals
On Wed, 12 Apr 2000, William Loughborough wrote:
In terms of generalization I've always had trouble with the selection of
one particular representational mode as a major focus: tables. A table
is much like any means of presentation of underlying data, i.e. it is
largely designed for ease of use by eyeballs. There is no singularity
separating tables from bar charts, pie graphs, or any X-Y presentation
of data that lends itself to that. In short the important consideration
is that the content (raw data points) is separable from its
presentation. I believe that the guidelines at their highest level of
abstraction should deal with that and not with tables used as format vs.
tables used as "tables". The latter are just a means of presenting
underlying data to people of the retinal persuasion. Deal with all such
issues in some technique/example space but the focus needs to be on
maintaining access to the content, never mind what the author thinks is
best for the reader.
--
Love.
ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
http://dicomp.pair.com
--
Charles McCathieNevile mailto:charles@w3.org phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001, Australia
Received on Thursday, 13 April 2000 11:53:13 UTC