Re: conflation of issues or convergence of interests?

On Sat, Jul 28, 2007 at 02:11:06PM +0100, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:

> Providing fallback inside the new proposed <video> and <audio> elements is 
> no different from fallback inside <object>, so architecture-wise I see no 
> difference.

Correct, and that's a sufficient reason for including such a feature in the
design. It shouldn't be controversial. The decision was taken a long time ago
in HTML that such alternatives should be explicitly associated with the
content to which they relate. Assistive technologies, authoring tools, testing
tools, etc., benefit from this decision, by virtue of the semantics captured
in the markup.

For user agents that don't support the rendering of alternatives, the cost is
negligible: it is necessary only to parse, and ignore, this aspect of the
markup. However, in practice, accessibility reasons are sufficiently
important to constitute a prima facie case for implementation.

Received on Sunday, 29 July 2007 00:19:49 UTC