- From: Alan J. Flavell <flavell@a5.ph.gla.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 01:29:57 +0000 (GMT)
- To: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
- cc: WAI Markup Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Jason White wrote: > A crucial issue here is whether the "graceful degradation" guideline > captures this requirement adequately, or whether we should admit some > redundancy in order to emphasise the importance of avoiding reliance on > client-side scripts. Please excuse me if I have misunderstood the intentions or the practical realities, but it had been my understanding that this was supposed to help in situations where readers are applying a general screen-reader in conjunction with the mass-market graphical browsers. The latter seem to have no facility to exploit the ALT attributes of client-side maps. Maybe it would be nice if they would catch up with Lynx, but the reality seems to be otherwise. I think we have to accept that not everyone actually wants to use Lynx... nor emacs-w3 for that matter. > I like the formulation which asserts that all > "functions and content should be available without client-side scripts", > meaning that if they are unsupported or turned off, there must be an > alternative means of achieving the same functionality. Indeed; but what is at issue here is whether the provision of that alternative is a mandate on browser developers, or on document authors. (Sometimes, in a difficult network situation, quite ordinary WWW users with no special needs would like their browser to support the option of not being forced to load images in order to navigate, no?).
Received on Monday, 9 November 1998 20:30:06 UTC