Re: xml.gov

First of all, I'm by no means an XML expert, but it looks to me like 
survey.xml is nicely broken. I'm sure the idea here is that 
http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug/XML-forum/survey.xml is a wrapper for the 
actual data in http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug/XML-forum/survey.txt to be 
included, but it doesn't work this way (they would probably want to use 
XLink or XInclude for that).

The HTML table that you're seeing is merely created by the client-side 
XSL transformation (which Mozilla and IE5+ can handle) 
http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug/XML-forum/survey.xsl

Now, as for accessibility of the actual technology (regardless that this 
particular implementation is just plain broken): provided that the 
browser can actually handle client-side XSL transformation, 
screenreaders "should" be fine with it (only tested IE6+JAWS). However, 
it obviously doesn't work in anything without XSLT capability (Lynx, 
older versions of IE, Safari, Opera, etc), and would be presented to the 
user as meaningless junk. The only time it may be safe to rely on 
client-side XSLT would be in a controlled environment such as an 
intranet application (where you can ideally guarantee what software is 
installed on client machines). The easy way out, of course, is to do the 
transformation server-side, and send nice, accessible HTML back to the 
user agent...


Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Thursday, 12 August 2004 00:06:34 UTC