Re: Sv: Question from Last Week's WCAG Teleconference

At 02:25 AM 10/26/00 -0700, Claus Thøgersen wrote:
>I am worried about the idea that specialized user experiences will solve 
>many problems because I have never seen a system that is capable of 
>behaving in accordance with my very unstable and often unprodictable 
>preferences in other ways than by obeying my commands.

Hence the term "pie in the sky". What's "gonna be" (particularly "just 
around the corner" or "real soon now" or "within six months") has a strong 
correlation with the term "vaporware". I have no doubt that there will be 
systems that *seem* to answer all these issues via CC/PP, etc. but their 
deployment is likely to take longer and not be as effective as our dreams 
of them - at least that's been my experience with everything ever proposed 
in any field whatsoever.

So - in our 50,000 foot view from above it would appear that despite there 
being a billion or so pages online, HTML is the same kind of dinosaur as 
COBOL (which still probably employs more programmers than C, C++, and Java 
combined) - NOT! We're a long way from going through the XHTML transition 
and pretending that XML (the problems of a not-yet "new thing" seem easily 
surmountable until you try to climb on board a moving train) will make our 
current efforts vain if we can just wait a minute (or the now-proverbial 
six months).

The upshot is that we are well on our way to a nicely generalized, 
reasonably abstract guideline set called 2.0 and what we learn from 
hammering at GL 3.1, etc. in the previous incarnation should be heeded. "Do 
not use color *only*" isn't parallel to "provide equivlalentcies" and 
that's the kind of stuff we must get clear in our minds. The overarching 
"first, do no harm" and "erect no barrier" deserve (and are getting) 
extensive explanations/examples and we should be able to continue refining 
these statements with clarifications.

Claus' "unpredictable preferences" are truer for the device than for the 
person involved - and we must not forget that there's a person involved. 
This is pretty much a DUH! kind of thing but we all tend to expect inertia 
not to be a part of momentum, and that just ain't the case. I've worked 
over 20 years on a project that is just now starting to fructify. Our stuff 
won't take that long, but...

There is a doughnut around that hole and we must keep our eye on it.

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE