Content selection

Referring to the "Content Selection for Device Independence" working
draft at http://www.w3.org/TR/cselection/ and in particular the
example in section 4.4, I raise the following issues:

It is important to emphasize from the start that content selection is
an important tool that will enable content to be customized for a
variety of devices and user needs. My questions pertain to the
interaction between content selection and WCAG.

Does example 4.4 in the draft meet guideline 1.1? Should it? Is the
answer the same or different depending on whether content selection is
implemented on the server, in a proxy, or in the user-agent?

My own answer would be that the example as provided shouldn't meet
guideline 1.1, since there is presumably meaningful information
delivered to image-capable devices that is not provided in the text. I
would also say that it shouldn't matter where the content selection is
implemented (server-side or client-side) - the answer is the same in
both circumstances. Also, I don't think our guidelines are clear on
these points. Specifically, I think that someone who interprets the
guidelines as applying only to the content that reaches the user agent
would conclude that if the image is not included in the XHTML that the
user agent receives, there is no non-text content and hence guideline
1.1 is trivially met. Needless to say I would argue that this is an
undesirable interpretation of the guidelines that we ought to exclude.
I don't have a concrete proposal however.

Received on Saturday, 10 July 2004 06:33:08 UTC