RE: Does order affect meaning (was: NEW: Issue #1609)

Joe Clark wrote:

<blockquote>
If we stop using hard-to-understand buzzwords for a moment, if you 
rearrange items on a Web page, they're not necessarily going to be easy
to 
understand. I have opposed any endorsement whatsoever of remixing
authors' 
Web pages without their foreknowledge and will continue to do so. It has

no place in our guidelines. I just can't make anybody else understand 
that. You all think it's just the neatest thing you've ever seen in your

lives, and you simply ignore all my evidence to the contrary.
</blockquote>

The success criterion in question isn't about reordering content without
the author's foreknowledge. It calls for authors to ensure that readers
can encounter content in an order which the author intends and which
will make sense to the reader.

Your concern about success criteria that would require content such as
section titles and link text to make sense when removed from their
context on the page has been noted, and is shared by a number of people
in the WG.


"Good design is accessible design."

Dr. John M. Slatin, Director 
Accessibility Institute
University of Texas at Austin 
FAC 248C 
1 University Station G9600 
Austin, TX 78712 
ph 512-495-4288, fax 512-495-4524 
email jslatin@mail.utexas.edu 
Web http://www.utexas.edu/research/accessibility 



-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Joe Clark
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 1:37 PM
To: WAI-GL
Subject: RE: Does order affect meaning (was: NEW: Issue #1609)



> Greg Lowney says he can't think of real-world examples where 
> reordering
> the contents would not affect their meaning. However, this depends on 
> the level you are considering: a set of delivery units, single
delivery 
> units or even lower levels.

If we stop using hard-to-understand buzzwords for a moment, if you 
rearrange items on a Web page, they're not necessarily going to be easy
to 
understand. I have opposed any endorsement whatsoever of remixing
authors' 
Web pages without their foreknowledge and will continue to do so. It has

no place in our guidelines. I just can't make anybody else understand 
that. You all think it's just the neatest thing you've ever seen in your

lives, and you simply ignore all my evidence to the contrary.

> At the sentence level, the situation is obviously very different.

We are not proposing to reorder sentences. The only examples people ever

come up with-- *always* inspired by the supercool feature of Jaws-- are 
headings and links.

-- 

     Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org
     Accessibility <http://joeclark.org/access/>
       --This.
       --What's wrong with top-posting?

Received on Wednesday, 24 August 2005 19:09:47 UTC