RE: Is there a source document for every Web resource?

Yvette, thanks for continuing to think about this one!

The context of my question about whether or not all Web documents have
source documents (along the lines of thos4e for static HTML/XHTML
documents) was my work on guideline 3.2 (formerly 3.4), the one about
organizing content in consistent ways and making interactive components
behave predictably.  Specifically, I was trying to find a way to phrase
a success criterion that would allow us to require at least one
presentation format in which repeated components such as navigation
bars, search forms, sections within main content, etc., would have to
occur in the same order.  The model I was working from was that of
<div>-basedWeb pages where screen readers speak the elements in the
order in which they appear in the source document.  Developers are free
to arrange the elements *visually* in whatever order makes most sense
visually, while the same components might be read in a different order
by screen readers based on the order in which they occur in the source
document.  I was thinking that this would be the auditory equivalent of
consistent visual layout.

I ended up dropping the success criterion (I think!) because I couldn't
come up with wording that seemed meaningful without constraining visual
presentation in ways that our self-imposed crteria for levels 1, 2, and
3 would allow.

John


"Good design is accessible design." 
Please note our new name and URL!
John Slatin, Ph.D.
Director, Accessibility Institute
University of Texas at Austin
FAC 248C
1 University Station G9600
Austin, TX 78712
ph 512-495-4288, f 512-495-4524
email jslatin@mail.utexas.edu
web http://www.utexas.edu/research/accessibility/


 



-----Original Message-----
From: Yvette P. Hoitink [mailto:y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl] 
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 3:11 am
To: John M Slatin; w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: RE: Is there a source document for every Web resource?


Hello John and list,

Pictures (jpg, gif, etc) do not have source documents in the regular
sense of the word. I don't know if that is a good example, because I do
not quite understand the context of the question. Could you explain some
more what you need counter-examples for?

Also, for PDF the source is the postscript file but authors seldom code
these by hand but have a program like Acrobat or PDF distiller that does
it for them. 

Another example might be MP3. You cannot say "view source" there
anywhere. The file format of MP3 is a mystery to almost everyone
publishing MP3 content so almost no author ever does anything with the
source.

This is stretching the concept of "host technologies" a bit, but it is
content found on the web that in my opinion does not have a source
document in any way the author has influence over.
 
Hope this helps,

Yvette Hoitink
CEO Heritas, Enschede, The Netherlands
E-mail: y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl

Received on Tuesday, 2 March 2004 11:37:52 UTC