Re: Final review of WCAG requirements document prior to publication as a W3C note

At 12:52 PM 2000-05-03 +1000, Jason White wrote:
>We could perhaps say: techniques for client-side programming using the
>DOM, with examples in Java, Ecmascript, etc. This should explain the scope
>of the work item with sufficient clarity. DOM level 0 could then be
>considered, though naturally, most attention would be paid to DOM levels 1
>and 2 (especially level 2 with its new, more generic, event set that
>offers real opportunities for device-independence and makes accessible
>client-side interactive applications feasible).

This begs the question of whether we are going to go after the scripting
practices and implementations themselves.

What goes in the DOM is a waning proportion of what controls what the user
experiences, in many modern script-heavy sites.

I am afraid that we somehow have to take a fresh look at "what the user is
up against" and not limit ourselves to "media under the control of W3C
specifications" as the content we are looking at, or we will be developing
better and better rules for a less and less relevant subset of what is
actually going on.

[Don't tell him I said this, but...]  Chuck Opperman was right.  People are
designing web applications today, not web documents.  We need to look into
what the stuff and structure is that they are made up of, and how that can
be brought in under the accessibility umbrella, or else we have a _major_
war on our hands to replace script with something else.

Or at least that is the problem I see us facing in the dynamic content area.  

I don't think we can say it is what is happening in the DOM and get our
hands around it.  We may just have to back off the whole problem for lack
of resources, but I don't think that this should be done without a serious
attempt to identify the real problem, what resources it is going to take to
tackle the problem, and how we can gather up those resources.

my $.02

Al

Received on Tuesday, 2 May 2000 23:40:38 UTC