- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU>
- Date: Wed, 20 Aug 1997 10:09:52 +1000 (AEST)
- To: WAI Working Group <w3c-wai-wg@w3.org>
What Daniel is suggesting, I think, is that once the necessary guidelines have been written, and HTML has evolved so as to be more medium independent, authors need only concern themselves with a single member of the tripple which T.V. Raman defines, namely the HTML markup. The functionality of user agents and access agents is an extremely important issue which must be addressed as part of the WAI process, but HTML authors should not be required or expected to take into account what I earlier described as the idiosyncrasies of specific implementations. There should be a single, well marked up document which can with equal effectiveness be presented graphically on screen, printed, represented by means of a braille display, rendered in audio, etc. Experience has shown that recommendations which detract from the visual aesthetics of a document will not be enthusiastically endorsed by web content providers, for example the "one link per line" idea or the d-link suggestion. The preferable alternative is to emphasize the distinction, which is already inherent in HTML, between appearance and semantic content, to take full advantage of the style sheet mechanism and to develop braille and audio formatting software which can provide optimal presentations of HTML documents in each of these media. This work also provides the opportunity to encourage the adoption of good design principles by HTML content providers and authoring software developers.
Received on Tuesday, 19 August 1997 20:13:23 UTC