Re: Minutes from 16 November 2000 WCAG WG telecon

At 7:50 PM -0800 11/22/00, William Loughborough wrote:
>At 05:59 PM 11/22/00 -0800, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>>single interface model of web design.
>
>What's that mean?

It means that you create one set of markup -- a single interface
to the content -- and you rely on graceful degradation, the sending
of redundant content, and the good will of the browser to make it
accessible to the user.  In other words, one source, one interface,
and cross your fingers and hope you get it right.

Edapta's model is adaptive to the user's needs and creates a new
interface that can be -optimized- for that user.  Well, it's not
uniquely Edapta's -- a number of other folks are slowly but surely
moving into that area, Microsoft among them.  We're just smaller
and faster and noisier, so I've staked it out as "ours". :)

As a trivial example, if someone has indicated a desire not to
see images at all (maybe they're blind, maybe they're on Lynx,
maybe they just hate images; it's up to them), the server won't
even bother to send an <img> tag, with or without valid alt
attribute; instead, it will send them a version of the page with
structured text markup that replaces the image functionality
seamlessly and in a way best suited for non-graphical display.

A single design model would rely on sending the <img> tag and
then that information (the src="blah", etc) being ignored and
the alt tag parsed out.  This is generally a sufficient approach,
but there are some weaknesses, as well, because it is a
compromise method; an adaptive interface approach can overcome
many of these.  As examples:  With a single interface, the
non-graphical page layout is a derivative of the graphical
layout, which is almost certainly sub-optimal; the alt attribute
in HTML allows only for a simple text string and not structured
text.

--Kynn
-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Thursday, 23 November 2000 00:42:07 UTC