Re: Fresh start? Re: Minimal Browser Capabilities

At 9:07 PM -0500 12/26/01, Charles McCathieNevile wrote (on WAI IG)
>If so we could asssume those as minimal browser capabilities. (This is
>already important - WCAG didn't assume people could find an empty text field,
>so included checkpoint 10.4 - if that is no longer a valid assumption, then
>that checkpoint could be dropped.)
>
>Now, let's look at other HTML capabilities:

A good candidate for "base HTML capabilities" would be XHTML
Basic and the HTML equivalent thereof.

>What about elements like abbr, acronym, dfn or tt? What about styling? What
>about dynamic content provided through various script languages, or flash,
>SVG, Java, python? What about handling valid code? What kind of systems do
>people have to use this software on?

I think it's not enough to simply "ignore" or "not break" on <abbr>
and <acronym> and <dfn> and <tt> -- there should be some manner in
which this information is conveyed to the user.  It shouldn't be
treated as a <div> or <span> alone.

In my opinion, styling is not merely "content enhancement" as some
have claimed, and therefore -- at the very least -- CSS level one
should be supported.  There is an increasing argument to be made that
JavaScript is standardizable enough that some subset of basic
JavaScript must be supported.

So, it looks like the list I'd draw up, as a start, would be:

* XHTML Basic
* HTML equivalents for XHTML Basic
* CSS level 1
* ECMAscript (plus W3C DOM?)

In my opinion that constitutes a reasonable baseline of support for
2001 web browsers.  Anything less than that is lagging behind spec
by a great deal, and represents software in serious need of upgrade.

--Kynn

-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                 http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain            http://idyllmtn.com
Web Accessibility Expert-for-hire          http://kynn.com/resume
January Web Accessibility eCourse           http://kynn.com/+d201

Received on Wednesday, 26 December 2001 21:33:13 UTC