Re: Common failures (was: Common failures and baseline)

Ineke van der Maat wrote:
> Can anybody tell me what to write in the baseline whenthe page contains 
> xhtml that is delived as xml. You know IE does not support this now.
> 
> but by creating a baseline for xhtml the site is accessible for all,

There is a significant difference between stating "the site is 
accessible to all" and "the site is accessible to users with a UA that 
meets the baseline requirements".  If a user doesn't have the right tool 
for they job, they'll need to obtain one before they can access the content.

> also for those who have IE?
> 
> hetre is the big failure...

Although XHTML isn't natively supported in IE, there are other tools 
freely available that do support it.

In comparison, consider a baseline that includes PDF as a requirement. 
Like XHTML, IE does not natively support PDF.  So, by your logic, this 
would be a big failure.  However, this is clearly not the case.  PDFs 
can be made accessible and there are tools freely available to access them.

The only significant different between the PDF and XHTML cases is that 
the distribution of PDF readers is currently significantly higher than 
that of XHTML, and that would indeed have some impact upon the decision 
to include XHTML in a baseline these days; but keep in mind that this 
situation is likely to change in the future.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/

Received on Friday, 26 May 2006 06:14:42 UTC