- From: Brian Kelly <lisbk@ukoln.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 15:45:42 +0100
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Hi I attended the recent WAI meeting at the RNIB, Peterborough, England. It was good to meet the various representatives of the WAI communities there. At the meeting I had lost of questions to ask. Various WAI WG chairs suggested I join the w3c-wai-ig@w3.org mailing list and ask my questions there. I hope I'm not asking too many FAQs (I've had a quick read through the archives). Much of the WAI work is based on the deployment of more accessible formats (HTML 4.0, CSS 2.0), providing advice on how to use these formats (Authoring Guidelines) and develop authoring tools and user agents. The WAI work seems to assume that the current generation of browsers will (rapidly) disappear and that we shouldn't be too concerned at the interoperability problems we currently face (e.g. buggy CSS implementation). I think this assumption is dangerous (even if WAI people don't make it, readers of various WAI guidelines are likely to make it). To take a trivial example. The use of .margin-left CSS values to indent text is currently recommended over use of tables, multiple <DL> tricks, etc. In practice however .margin-left and .margin-right cause sever problems when printing resources in Netscape 4 (Windows NT/95). These CSS properties are on the list of unsafe properties in the list at http://www.webreview.com/guides/style/unsafegrid.htm So the naive user who finds that CSS is recommended for accessible documents and picks up a 10 minute guide to CSS is likely to find themselves producing documents which are not accessible as hard copy to users of what is probably still the most widely deployed browser. Even the minority of sophisticated users of CSS will find it difficult to avoid using these features if they're using a high level authoring tool. I had hoped that some protocol wizardry would come to the rescue. However I understand that Transparent Content Negotiation is not widely used and there is little interest in it from the browser, server and authoring tool communities. So it's even more unlikely that we'll see Transparent Feature Negotiation, which could allow only safe HTML / CSS features to be sent to a browser. The W3C Core Style Sheet Gallery does have some application wizardry. It uses browser-sniffing to serve "safe" CSS. A very cursory inspection I made yesterday showed that the IE CSS file contained 797 lines and the Netscape 4 file 169 lines. However I have not seen any mention of browser-sniffing in the WAI guidelines, or in any other W3C document. Although this may address the deployment problem, I suspect it will be a minority solution as it does seem complicated to implement. It would be ironic if only large companies (such as Microsoft) had the resources to deploy such techniques for making websites accessible to legacy browsers but well-meaning authors who did not have access to (complicated?) scripting facilities had to chose between accessible pages as defined by tools such as Bobbie) or inaccessible pages which can at least be printed. My questions: o Are there technical solutions to the legacy browser problem which we can expect to be widely available? o If not does the WAI community have any ideas when legacy browsers will be so little used that they can be ignored? Can you give advice to organisations who have to make such choices? Note that this can be a dangerous question as many websites don't get many hits from Lynx. Thanks Brian Kelly ------------------------------------------------------ Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus UKOLN, University of Bath, BATH, England, BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Homepage: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/b.kelly.html Phone: 01225 323943 FAX: 01225 826838
Received on Tuesday, 4 August 1998 10:47:41 UTC