Re: meeting happenings

I tend to agree with the position which Al and Daniel took regarding CSS
2: to promote the broader aim of accessibility, it is important that a
flexible style sheet standard be available to the public sooner rather
than later, so that authors will have an insentive to commence their
migration toward style sheets and away from tables and other ad hoc means
of controlling visual formatting. The most important aim therefore, with
this end in mind, is to ensure that the accessibility features present in
CSS 2 are (1) useful and suited to their purpose; and (2) compatible with
the future extensions which the WAI intends to pursue.

With regard to the SPEAKROW issue, I do not fully appreciate how it could
be regarded as falling within the purview of the DOM specification. As I
understand it, the purpose of DOM is to expose markup and style
information to external programmes, including access software and
scripting languages, and to allow these applications to modify the
document in prescribed ways. The SPEAKROW capability, on the contrary, is
supposed to be a stylistic device available to the author, whereby he or
she can exert a high degree of influence over the audio rendering of each 
row and cell in the table. Thus, it would appear to belong in CSS rather
than DOM.

Given the more general considerations enunciated above, there should be no
harm in postponing the development of this functionality until work begins
on CSS 3.

At present, aside from reviewing the final HTML 4.0 draft with respect to
the changes agreed upon at the meeting and reviewing interim drafts of CSS
2, it seems that the WAI Formats and Protocols effort is free to start
organising its priorities in relation to other W3C standards and the long
term issues which have been raised.

Received on Saturday, 15 November 1997 18:12:30 UTC