Re: Split Issue 30?

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Charles Pritchard <chuck@jumis.com> wrote:
> On 2/10/2012 10:57 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>
>> On Feb 10, 2012, at 8:23 AM, Laura Carlson wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Sam,
>>>
>>>> I dislike this characterization and the innuendo that people may be
>>>> playing
>>>> tricks.
>>>
>>> I am sorry you dislike it. But re-ordering issues to strengthen one
>>> proposal over another is not equitable.
>>
>> I think that the key consideration for the Working Group should be to
>> ensure that every issue and every proposal gets fair consideration. This
>> needs to take priority over considerations of which proposal benefits.
>>
>> It seems to me that your argument is purely based on giving a tactical
>> advantage to the "Instate Longdesc" Change Proposal, not on making sure that
>> *all* proposals  get a fair hearing, with all possible information on the
>> table. I can understand why you would feel that way; it's natural to want to
>> advocate for your preferred proposal. But I think it is unlikely that the
>> Chairs would give a lot of weight to that type of argument, because our job
>> is to ensure that the process is fair to everyone, not to help a particular
>> side win.
>>
>> While the Chairs rarely order issues for the sake of dependencies, I have
>> to agree with Sam that the last thing we want is for ISSUE-30 to get
>> reopened yet another time.
>
>
> Laura has repeatedly addressed the other two change proposals, as well as
> thoroughly documenting her reasons for asking that longdesc be maintained as
> a web standard.
>
> Jonas, the author of one of the proposals has stated that his proposal is
> not directly intended for longdesc. But, he is hoping that it can eventually
> lead to longdesc being obsoleted.

Please don't put words in my mouth.

I added the part about changes to the @hidden attribute since I felt
that it was something that clearly and obviously improve accessibility
on the web, both with regards to descriptions (long and short, for
elements that support longdesc and for elements that don't) as well as
for other features that ARIA adds.

Hence I felt this was a good way to "meet in the middle" since many
people had said that we shouldn't remove longdesc until we have
something that can replace it.

To my surprise at least a few people in the accessibility community
has now requested this change to be reverted after Hixie put it into
the spec.

I'm still eagerly waiting for the explanation of why the change Hixie
made was bad for accessibility (modulo the obvious spec-bug that the
description was specified to be completely empty when aria-describedby
points to a hidden element, something I've now fixed in my change
proposal).

/ Jonas

Received on Sunday, 12 February 2012 13:05:04 UTC