- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 20:23:18 +0000 (GMT)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> When i contact browser developers, they say that if it aint a W3C > standard they wont implement it. Its not been agreed as a standard. W3C doesn't produce standards, only reccomendations! Whoops! There can't be any commercial web browsers! This is a typical commercial attitude; it's also why email programs fail to honour Precedence: List and suppress out of office replies. Unfortunately, you have to have water tight, objectively testable, specifications, which is why section 508 is preferred to WCAG and why people go by the letter of Bobby not the spirit. Any manager who allows more to be implemented than required by the specification is not doing his job. Early internet specifications are particularly prone to this problem as they were written for people who understood the spirit in which they were written. Unfortunately, tight specifications lead to inflexibility, and accessibility cannot be reduced to a series of rules that can be consistently verified. The developers will go beyond the specification if they think that they can make money that way. (People often think that buying on a fixed price contract removes the risk from the buyer, but forget that it requires a great deal of effort in writing the specification. The seller usually wins, as they are better at ignoring the assumptions made by the buyer.)
Received on Thursday, 23 January 2003 17:17:29 UTC