RE: WCAG 2.0 -> 3 - Bottom Layer (Server Side Techniques)

On Wednesday, 27 August 2003 12:43 AM, Al Gilman wrote:

This is an important topic and it should go forward.

It is an open question how much of this should be published as an
"accessibility" document or as a "quality" document, a companion to
the CUAP and CHIP documents.  Failure of server operators to employ
the functionality in the specifications or to give content authors
control over the necessary [HTTP header] metadata have repeatedly
frustrated the intentions of Web architecture.

I don't think we are going to see an HTML 4.02 out of W3C with the DTD
changes that you suggest.  But I would definitely go to bat for a policy
statement that it is an OK and sometimes constructive thing to do to scrub
your content (on posting to the server) with a stricter DTD than the
specification requires.  Interoperability failures happen when the server
assumes user agent respect for rules that the UA does not understand or
process.  Examples here are altered content models for TABLE as you suggest
and html:a.name (make the content be NMTOKEN rather than CDATA).

<http://www.w3.org/2002/02/mid/5.1.0.14.2.20021129085107.01e3f080@pop.iamdig
ex.net;list=www-qa>

Al


I also feel it is addresses the charter of WCAG2 more succinctly because it
"attempts to apply checkpoints to a wider range of technologies".

I also feel that this way of addressing content delivery will become much
more prevalent and a lot of front end development will just die due to it's
inefficiency, impracticality, and ineconomy of scale for delivering content.

Geoff

Received on Tuesday, 26 August 2003 11:52:43 UTC