- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
- Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2000 15:26:52 +1000 (EST)
- To: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
As I remember, most of these assumptions were discussed in teleconferences during the development of the 1.0 guidelines and have been partially documented in minutes. For example, we made an explicit decision (which I consider to be entirely justified) that if an access problem results from a shortcoming in user agent implementations, and can be remedied by means of a repair tool which has been or will soon become freely available, then the guidelines should not recommend that the author take steps, in the design of the content, to circumvent the problem. This was applied to checkpoint 5.3, but similar reasoning was also employed in other cases. I agree that it would be helpful to document these assumptions, for instance by mentioning them in an introductory section of the guidelines. We also discussed, on an earlier occasion, the presupposition underlying the guidelines, to the effect that every person who uses the web, can be expected to gain access to a user agent which supports, at a minimum, some version of HTTP and HTML, including form submission capabilities. The question of user agent profiling and minimal requirements needs to be considered further however. For example, one can assume that every user agent which supports generic XML content, will also support a style language, or that every user agent which supports client-side programmatic objects will provide at least DOM level 0, and probably DOM level 1.
Received on Thursday, 15 June 2000 01:28:04 UTC