- From: Daniel Dardailler <danield@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 02 Feb 1999 10:59:05 +0100
- To: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- cc: WAI GL <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
> I think we should advocate the use of NOFRAMES for all FRAMESETs. Although > by and large the UA can solve the problem for simple sets, it is not > really the best solution - the best solution is to solve it by design, and > the responsibility is on the author to do that. I agree an author can achieve a better job by adding a NOFRAMES section by hand, but if a few UAs can do it in an accessible way, I still reluctant to ask millions of authors to redo their design manually, when the responsibility really lies into the hand of the language designer (the people that designed FRAME without careful thinking). There is something purely visual about FRAME: they are primarily meant to save the back-and-forth navigation between an index and a content page by keeping the index *visible* at all time. In a serial media, such as voice or line braille, you cannot really provide this functionality, and a new design is required. With the tools and languages we have today, the UA can do an accessible but not a perfect job at this new design. To consider a very simple case, if an author writes FRAMESET FRAME vertical left 20% name=index FRAME leftover name=content then the UA can easily provide a degraded interface made of links to the individual FRAME: [index] [content] whereas the NOFRAME author would probably have designed a start page with the index directly inline, thus saving a intermediary link page to the serial reader. But consider a new language construct an author can use to designate the "entry-point" page in its frameset (index in my example), an "variable-content-page", "fixed-page", etc, then suddenly, the UA can do a much better job, approaching closely what the author would do in NOFRAME, without duplication. I guess my point is that it's for WAI PF to think about, and not for GL to start asking authors about. But I'm OK with P2 for all FRAMESET if that's what people want.
Received on Tuesday, 2 February 1999 04:59:11 UTC