Re: Suggested clarification on style sheets for wcag

Does anyone know, what is the closest we could come in the Dublin Core to
an attribute type of [authoring-organization-defined] status-or-mood?  

The notion of a W3C 'Recommendation' has connotations which involve a
shared view as to the stability and efficacy of the technology articulated
in the document.  The stability and efficacy notions are software
engineering generic notions.  The collective opinion is a voting generic
notion.  The W3C is a unique organizational entity.  But one could use
generic logic language to form an assertion about shared believe state with
regard to primitive notions imported from software engineering.
There is a definite connotation of "people should use it" but the strict
sense of the imperative mode has been softened [for reasons suppressed here].

Al

At 09:18 AM 6/15/99 -0400, Ian Jacobs wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I think the WG should strengthen a statement
>in the guidelines that any important 
>content inserted by a style sheet be available in the 
>document source as well (rationale: device-independence,
>users can override styles, etc.)
>
>The line between content and style is blurred by some
>parts of CSS. Style sheets may cause numbers or words
>to be generated in the rendering structure, just as they 
>can insert images. Most users will have a difficult time 
>distinguishing the document tree from the rendering structure, 
>and will have to read the style sheets to find
>out whether "1.2" was generated by styles (and therefore
>may be changed through styles) or inserted by hand. 
>
>In the Techniques document of 5 May, we raise this issue
>obliquely:
>
>   Text generated by style sheets is not part of the 
>   document source and will not be available to assistive 
>   technologies that access content through DOM, level 1 
>   ([DOM1]). 
>
>I think we need to make a stronger point.
>
>Here's an example. W3C Recommendations use a background image 
>in the upper left hand corner to indicate on graphical browsers that
>that they are Recommendations. There is no alt text for this
>image since it's inserted by a style sheet (and CSS
>has no
>mechanism  for specifying alt text. On the one hand,
>one can argue that if the information is being inserted
>by a style sheet it is only meant for style, not content,
>and therefore not alt text is necessary. On the other
>hand, people argue that one shouldn't put text in images
>but should use styles so that the text is accessible.
>Also, languages like SVG that create graphics will real
>text in them tout the accessibility benefits.
>
>Does the title of the document suffice to convey
>the document status?
>
> - Ian
>
>-- 
>Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
>Tel/Fax:                     +1 212 684-1814
>

Received on Tuesday, 15 June 1999 11:14:12 UTC