Re: Request for Review

This message is sent only to AU although it is an answer to a cross post.

Major comments:
I think the exact purpose of these templates and style sheets should
be clarified. For example I use very different style sheets for the pages 
that I author and for my user style sheet. This is because I expect all 
kinds of markup from arbitrary pages, while my own pages have a very 
predictable (to me) structure.

With an authoring tool, I would expect to have a notion of 
a website or project, in which the set of HTML templates is 
tied to a limited number of style sheets. 

It is desirable to have different alternative style sheets with 
respect to a fixed set of HTML templates, emphasizing the benefits 
of separating content and structure from presentation.

Also style sheets can be made more general (applicable to more template sets)
by restricting selectors to be only applied to things that have predefined 
semantics such as HTML elements. If you use classes, it would be desirable to have 
a description of the meaning of each class in some document.

Other comments:

The style sheet uses "font-size: 9pt" which is an authoring 
guideline no no.
 
The classes "hide" and "right" are based on presentation rather than 
content or structure, which may be considered bad style as far 
as separating presentation from the HTML markup.

Maybe it would be better to use XHTML as this is 
the latest W3C recommendation.

Regards, 
Nir.

At 01:47 PM 3/9/00 -0500, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
[snip]
>The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines group, as part of the development
>of our techniques document, is working on the development of accessible
>template pages for authoring tools.
>
>We would like the WCAG and ER groups to review these templates for
>accessibility (and offer them for reference examples...) to ensure that we
>are meeting the standards to the highest possible level.
>
>The goals of the templates are to be as accessible as possible, and to be
>viable examples for real authoring tools to use. They should therefore
>transform graceful as far as possible.
>
>The first set of templates is now available:
>
>http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/WD-ATAG10-TECHS-20000308/templates/cmnMain - A "home
>page"
>
>http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/WD-ATAG10-TECHS-20000308/templates/cmnNews - A
>latset news / events page
>
>http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/WD-ATAG10-TECHS-20000308/templates/cmnStyle.css -
>the stylesheet for these pages
[snip]
>cheers
>
>Charles McCN

===================================
Nir Dagan
Assistant Professor of Economics
Brown University 
Providence, RI
USA

http://www.nirdagan.com
mailto:nir@nirdagan.com
tel:+1-401-863-2145

Received on Thursday, 9 March 2000 15:03:45 UTC