[Bug 8646] Private communication exception

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=8646


Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|REOPENED                    |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |WONTFIX




--- Comment #6 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>  2010-04-01 03:25:03 ---
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are
satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If
you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please
reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML
Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest
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   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: 

(In reply to comment #5)
> The Private communication email exceptions in the current editor's draft are
> beyond the scope of both HTML5 and WCAG 2.0 and should be addressed at a policy
> level rather than the specification level. This rule digresses too far into
> business-process issues.

I still don't understand what "policy level" means or the relevance of
businesses here.


> This email exceptions rule makes assumptions about the lifetime of messages and
> takes a static approach to disability. Emails get forwarded and the degree of
> disability may vary over time. The intended recipient isn't always the actual
> recipient. The intended recipient may well be able to view images, but
> rendering them on a device unable to render images or have images switched off
> to save on downloads. 

It would be futile to argue that if my 6 year old nephew sends me a private
e-mail including a picture of his birthday party, he should include alternative
text for the photo just in case one day I go blind and am looking through my
e-mail and am sad that I can't remember what the photo depicted. We have to
apply some level of realism here. It's one thing to argue that people should be
required to provide alternative text when they're publishing content on the
public Web — people might grumble and be frustrated at writing replacement
text, but they'll understand that it's the right thing to do. However, we are
never going to get traction claiming that private communications also need
alternative text. We will, in fact, merely be laughed at. There is simply no
point putting requirements in the spec that most people are not going to think
should _theoretically_ be followed.

(As a user of a non-graphical mail client, I have to say that I really don't
care if my friends include alternative text — if they send me a photo, I'm
going to go out of my way to download the photo and view it. I'm not going to
read the alternative text.)


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Received on Thursday, 1 April 2010 03:25:08 UTC