Re: linking? RE: Proposal for 3.4 Success Criteria

On Sun, 5 Aug 2001, David Woolley wrote:

  The advantage of only linking is that it forces one to consider relevance.
  Embedding encourages the use of decorative material, whereas out of line
  material has to be of real relevance, otherwise people will not follow the
  links.

CMN Yes, but this is not in any way restricted to the use of multimedia -
this applies for all content. The trick is to have the right balance of
between what is included and what is linked.

DJW
  If they can only get an idea of the topics, they may well be in the wrong
  place.  There is still a strong case for presenting completely different
  material to people with different intellectual levels or background
  knowledge, and, in many cases different organisations may be best suited
  to communicating at the different levels.  It can even be dangerous to
  get a partial understanding (there are many examples, but, for example
  CPR applied inappropriately can kill).

CMN There are cases where presenting multiple forms of content are important,
and as you say there are cases where it needs to be done right. (CPR is only
meant to be used on people who are effectively dead, by people who _might_ be
able to save them). But there are many more cases where extending access to
information is not dangerous, but helpful. Certainly WCAG techniques need to
deal with multiple versions of content, but situational restrictions are the
responsibility of individual content producers, and they should get their
information from appropriate sources (copyright is another example of
something that has relationships in implementation but is beyond the scope of
WCAG).
[semantic web stuff snipped from this mail]
DJW
  The main long term constraint is not so much technology as the cost of
  entry in terms of assembling a multi-disciplinary team to create a small
  web site.  Given that I treat accessibility as being more than just
  accessibility for physically and mentally disabled, there is a danger that
  you will be denying accessibility to publish.

CMN What we will be doing is denying that content is accessible just because
it was the best that some team managed to produce, and actually pointing out
what it needs to do in order to achieve "complete" accessibility (well, that
is probably impossible, but the closer we get to that goal the better in
terms of what we are trying to do here).

Cheers

Charles

Received on Monday, 6 August 2001 08:14:08 UTC