Re: Key results and recommendations from Face to Face

On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Wendy Chisholm wrote:

> 2. If a decision maker (a government, a customer, a company, a manager,
> or an author) *can* make further assumptions about the audience (either
> because they are a government that gives tools to its citizens or a
> company that sells an enterprise application that requires specific
> technology),  then an alternative  is not needed (for technology that
> might turned off or not supported).
Agreed.
> 3. If a decision maker *can not* make further assumptions about the
> audience (because the decision maker is publishing to the whole Web or
> doesn't have control over user tools), then the content is functional
> when technologies are turned off or not supported *or* an alternative
> must be provided.

The problem here is that it might be true for ever, or at least for a very
long time, that the only technologies which a user agent can be guaranteed
to support are some form of HTTP and HTML. As a result, the above item
would amount to stipulating that everything published to the Web at large
must be provided at least in HTML, regardless of whatever other format
might be used.

I don't think this is reasonable; in fact I don't think we should be
trying to restrict authors' choice of technologies on grounds of
availability at all. Rather, if there exist implementations of a
technology that meet suitable accessibility requirements, an author should
be entitled to rely on that technology, and to decide to make (or not
make) whatever assumptions seem appropriate.

Received on Wednesday, 23 March 2005 23:19:44 UTC