Re: Browser guidelines in authoring guidelines

> My general suggestion is to turn "interim" into a third
> category along with "Recommended" and "Required" because
> interim guidelines by their very nature can neither be
> recommended or required. See the following three points.

DD::

I'd say Interim are always recommended, and can't be required.
 
> This guideline still does not have an "interim" tag on it. 
> It should. I think, more to the point, this guideline is 
> problematic because it is not specific enough 
> about the target groups it affects and when
> such interim requirements will be relaxed. For example, if
> an author writes a table with <BR> elements at the end of
> each table cell, multi-column text will be readable
> using a screen reader and Lynx, using pwWebSpeak, and always
> using EmacsSpeak.

DD::

That's one way of looking at TABLE accessibility: if you ignore the
TABLE tags, and just present the content in the order it appears in
the markup, does it make sense ? The w3.org home page uses a TABLE for
presentation, and at some point, I know our webmaster reorganized the
cells so that the logical reading order would be fine using lynx
(which just ignore the table markup and use the content).

> But such a page would still not be readable
> with IE or Netscape and a screen reader (at least not until
> the screen readers support the DOM in the near future). 

DD::

So they are Interim, since in the future, UA should be able to
comprehend them.



> 8.2. Lists of links have non-link printable chars between them
> 
> This one doesn't hurt, but once again, it's a browser/AT issue.
> It doesn't belong as a recommended item.

Interim/Recommended is fine.

Received on Thursday, 23 April 1998 09:22:42 UTC