- From: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 15:33:33 +1000
- To: John Foliot <foliot@wats.ca>
- CC: 'Laura Carlson' <laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com>, www-html@w3.org, public-html@w3.org, 'Roger Johansson' <roger@456bereastreet.com>
John Foliot wrote: > It's sad that there seems to be this intense polarization, but clearly the > accessibility advocates are being ignored and dismissed, at times rudely. > Semantics are critical to web accessibility, and promoting a vision that > advocates, "We are against semantics for the sake of semantics." [Lachlan > Hunt: http://tinyurl.com/ys7lbo] clearly illustrates how deep this divide > is. It seems that you taking what I said way out of proportion, so let me clarify. Semantics for the sake of semantics refers things that have no real purpose or benefit to anyone, and only exist to appease a few semantic purists. It has nothing to do with rejecting semantics that can be shown to have real benefits for accessibility. But it has to be judged on a case-by-case basis, we can't just add all possible semantics for the sake of it. If there is some semantic feature that you think should be included, there needs to be clear use cases and problems to solve. When a feature is proposed, it needs to be explained: * What are the use cases? * What problems it solves and how? * Who benefits and how? * The incentive that authors will have to actually use it. * How it could be implemented. * The incentive that UA vendors have to implement it. Any semantic feature that can't provide satisfactory answers to any of those questions, doesn't deserve to be included in the spec. -- Lachlan Hunt http://lachy.id.au/
Received on Saturday, 12 May 2007 05:33:49 UTC