Re: the text in images issue

----- Original Message -----
From: "William Loughborough" <love26@gorge.net>

> However, having said that (grudgingly, in a way), it seems that since the
> path to Recommendation is at a minimum 6 months and since before any
> checkpoints are allowable there must be demonstrably usable
> implementations, there is no reason not to look forward enough to use both
> in our document. If we turn out to be wrong, it's just a matter of
changing
> some words, if in fact they turn out to be "good choices" then it would be
> silly not to account for them. Both technologies have significant notes
> about the accessibility advantages they present and unless we rescind
those
> papers, we must respect them.
[...]
> IOW we are betting that a year from now the fact that CSS was only
> partially implemented in the year 2000 will seem quaint and the idea of
> using raster graphics for much of anything will be close to unthinkable.

I'd put money up against that bet.
How long has PNG been a solid standard? It's obviously superior to both GIF
and JPEG for most applications. But due to the inertia of browser makers and
the market at large, even while most graphics tools support most of PNG,
it's a dormant technology.

CSS has been here for several years now, and there still isn't sufficient
talent out there using it as anything more than a cool layout widget to be
able to point it out as a serious accessibility tool. It's seen by designers
as a way to change this color or remove the underline from links, not as the
ultimate vision of the W3C. While I'm sure it's not the job of this working
group to second-guess the larger organization's published opinions, I still
think it's premature to say CSS Is The Way (or worse, CSS Is The Only Way)
to do certain things.

I think the gap between specification and widespread adoption is a lot
longer than a year. In the case of CSS, I think it's at least another 18
months, taking into account IE4's level of support has been around since
September of 1997; with SVG, closer to 36 months to 90% user agent
penetration and full tool compliance (and no less than 5 years to the utopia
in which they're used the way W3C expects) is my bet.

There are tools available for CSS, but many of them are probably not robust
enough to support accurate, cross-platform, cross-browser representations.
And to derive the ultimate benefit, that requirement excludes a number of
still serviceable user agents.

SVG doesn't even have that: no installed base, no widespread commercial
tools, and none of the real-world experience WCAG has used to base its own
guidelines/techniques/checkpoints upon. It's that experience that is the
bread and butter of the checkpoints. Until that base of knowledge is there,
I think a strategy of pushing it before it's supported really helps anyone.
If we can't come up with anything better than an educated guess, nobody's
going to be happy with the results, and that could decrease the perceived
value of the guidelines as a whole.

----
matt

Received on Monday, 18 December 2000 15:04:17 UTC