Re: Request for Review

Er, 

yes, until tools are developed that work properly we risk backlash. And we
should be careful to specify what we know about things that work and
don't, and what sort of differences we can expect. But if the alternative is
table-based layout, we already know what we can expect - that it doesn't cope
well with different-sized displays, and often doesn't work at all.

Things looking wildly different (as the template example can) is not
necessarily a huge problem. Part of the point is that on the Web things _DO_
look wildly different. Mobile phones have little black na white displays. THe
machine I am using has an 800x600 256 colour display. The other machine I use
comonly has a 1600x1200 display and can render (I believe) several million
different colours. And the browser I use most doesn't even show the images in
the same window. That is an important feature of the web. People can also get
upset that the tide is coming in, but they don't really have any way to do a
lot about it. (Some Danish king of England demonstrated this to his council
once as a rebuke to their idiotic suggestion that he was all-powerful). We
should make it clear to people that one of the features of the _entire_
medium is that it does not provide for visually faithful reproduction in most
circumstances (although the differences are fairly predictable) becuase this
will make the fact that people can restyle their content quite radically in
order to use it better an easier pill to swallow.

Sorry if this seems like a rant. Note that there is only one template
currently being reviewed, and we expect to produce others which will
themselves probably be wildly different. We would really like to know about
the accesibility of the templates, although the feedback on exaplinaing how
to use them and how they will behave is helpful.

Cheers

Charles McCN


On Sun, 12 Mar 2000, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:

  It's not just that the styling gets lost for people that don't have CSS 
  enabled.  It's that even with CSS enabled, CSS pages can look wildly 
  different in current browsers... at least that's my experience trying to 
  use CSS, and getting quite different results among NN 4, MSIE 5 and MSIE 5.
  
  So even if we present templates that have only minor bugs, we wind up 
  telling the developers that they have to follow these templates exactly or 
  they could run into trouble.  Or if we don't tell them and they run into 
  these problems, we risk backlash.
  
  I think CSS is find for font and character size, but beyond that we should 
  focus on other issues.
  
  Len
  
  
  At 06:02 AM 3/11/00 -0500, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
  >It does.
  >
  >It is in fact based on a commercial website. The marketing people were
  >perfectly happy that people who did not have CSS enabled saw a different
  >view.
  >
  >We are not demanding anything. We are suggesting this as a possible template
  >that can be used in an authoring tool.
  >
  >The question then is whether this particular style sheet prodces any bugs (I
  >am aware of one minor problem - MSIE 4 does not seem to support
  >display:block, so the links in the nav bar are not presented one per line as
  >they are in Netscape 4.
  >
  >Charles McCN
  >
  >On Fri, 10 Mar 2000, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:
  >
  >   Re
  >
  >   http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/WD-ATAG10-TECHS-20000308/templates/cmnMain - A 
  > "home
  >   page"
  >
  >   It uses style sheets for layout and background colors, which means that
  >   browsers that don't support these features see a radically different
  >   looking page.
  >
  >   Plus in general there are still bugs in CSS layout even on browsers that
  >   support them.
  >
  >   So we could get some understandable resistance from tool makers to seem to
  >   demand only CSS layout.
  >
  >   Len
  >   -------
  >   Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
  >   Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and
  >   Department of Electrical Engineering
  >   Temple University
  >   423 Ritter Annex, Philadelphia, PA 19122
  >
  >   kasday@acm.org
  >   http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday
  >
  >   (215) 204-2247 (voice)
  >   (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
  >
  >
  >--
  >Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
  >W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
  >Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
  >Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia
  
  -------
  Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
  Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and
  Department of Electrical Engineering
  Temple University
  423 Ritter Annex, Philadelphia, PA 19122
  
  kasday@acm.org
  http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday
  
  (215) 204-2247 (voice)
  (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
  

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Monday, 13 March 2000 02:02:26 UTC