RE: linking? RE: Proposal for 3.4 Success Criteria

Would that mean dropping the linking criteria from  3.4 as it's now written?
That's tough, I think, for a number of reasons: 

1. "Coming up" with text content is expensive. Adding additional non-text
content elements will mean a steep increase in production costs - from
product development through testing and maintenance.
2. Why create content if good examples already exist? For example: I'm not
going to create a visual map to my place of business if I can have one done
my mapquest and add that to my site. 

I don't mean "only" linking - but giving designers and writers the
opportunity to use appropriate and available existing content, linked in to
their site, 3.4 becomes much more realistic.

In the eLearning industry supplying content for instructors is gaining
acceptance rapidly. Providing content from the publishers who have
traditionally supplied only text books, but now supply interactive tutorials
and the normally expected graphics in textbooks means such content is
available - if at a cost. For the non-corporate environment there are
several "knowledge sites" on the Internet that provide a lot of freely
available content fitting 3.4's current requirements. While copyrighted, the
content can be linked to from a site and in some cases included in the site
with appropriate copyright mechanisms.

Joel

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles McCathieNevile
To: Joel Sanda
Cc: 'David Woolley '; 'w3c-wai-ig@w3.org '
Sent: 8/5/2001 8:33 AM
Subject: linking? RE: Proposal for 3.4 Success Criteria

The problem with only linking to the content is that fails to achieve
the
purpose of having the content there in the first place - to enable
someone
who cannot easily understand a plain text page to have an idea of the
main
topics of that page.

I recognise that there are concerns such as copyright and trademarking,
and
in some areas (like where I live) of bandwidth. There are emerging
technologies in the area of the semantic Web that we should expect to
use in
the medium term (several years before I imagine it being deployed in
browsers
that have been spread into schools for example) which will provide much
easier techniques for doing this.

In the meantime, we are still struggling to get the principles in an
agreed
explanation, so we may find the technology overtakes us in development
pace.
Without agreed principles, or even well-expressed ones that are there as
straw-man proposals, we are several steps away from being ready to
address
concerns of whether implementation details are so important as to negate
the
principle.

(But I think we are making some progress, which is encouraging <grin/>)

cheers

Charles

Received on Monday, 6 August 2001 00:26:46 UTC