Re: Braille on the QuickTips card?

dropping the http:// is something that is reasonable if you posit the
withering and disappearance of other formats. Currently mailto: is the only
one I would put money on remaining common, although the possibility of making
use of newer formats becomes more difficult. That may not be a big problem.

Dropping www relies on people using www as the first thing in the name of
their webservers. At most universities and other large distributed sites
there are large parts of the content served by machines called
somethingelse.somewhere.com - this is true of large companies as well, and
indeed of W3C.

URIs only work if they uniquely point to one resource. removing part of the
URI means that you are removing part of the ability to create new, similar
URIs who do not share that part. (Hence the reason that people in the rest of
the world resent the US for apprpriating the top level of the .com, .org,
.net, .edu and other domains through the laziness of not adding .us very
often.)

In addition, it is W3C policy that www.w3.org is part of any address that is
served from www.w3.org which means it would take a change in our own policy
(one which I would oppose) before we published something without the www.

Charles McCN

On Tue, 26 Oct 1999, Alan Cantor wrote:

  Allow me to emerge, for just a minute, from my insane schedule (and my
  consequent inability to participate much in EO activities as of late) to
  suggest this:
  
  First, yes, yes, yes to Braille on the Quick Tip card. 
  
  Second, there is a simple way to squeeze the URL in Braille on the card:
  State the URL as:
  
  w3c.org/wai
  
  Of course, this is not the "accepted" way to express a URL, especially
  amongst the more computer-savvy amongst us. But this format works on every
  browser I have ever tried, including Lynx. 
  
  Now, let me gaze into my crystal ball... I predict that in the near future
  this format WILL emerge as the "normal" way to express a URL. The tide
  will turn as more and more people discover that the abbreviated format
  usually works. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, for example, now
  promotes its web site as cbc.ca. Personally, I rarely type "www" when
  entering a web address, and I have not typed "http://" in months.
  
  Alan
  

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Tuesday, 26 October 1999 13:19:16 UTC